Title: The Five Hells of Orion
Author: Pohl, Frederik
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Five Hells of Orion" ***


                        THE FIVE HELLS OF ORION

                           BY FREDERICK POHL

                Out in the great gas cloud of the Orion
                Nebula McCray found an ally--and a foe!

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
              Worlds of If Science Fiction, January 1963.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


His name was Herrell McCray and he was scared.

As best he could tell, he was in a sort of room no bigger than a prison
cell. Perhaps it was a prison cell. Whatever it was, he had no business
in it; for five minutes before he had been spaceborne, on the Long Jump
from Earth to the thriving colonies circling Betelgeuse Nine. McCray
was ship's navigator, plotting course corrections--not that there were
any, ever; but the reason there were none was that the check-sightings
were made every hour of the long flight. He had read off the azimuth
angles from the computer sights, automatically locked on their beacon
stars, and found them correct; then out of long habit confirmed the
locking mechanism visually. It was only a personal quaintness; he had
done it a thousand times. And while he was looking at Betelgeuse, Rigel
and Saiph ... it happened.

The room was totally dark, and it seemed to be furnished with a
collection of hard, sharp, sticky and knobby objects of various shapes
and a number of inconvenient sizes. McCray tripped over something
that rocked under his feet and fell against something that clattered
hollowly. He picked himself up, braced against something that smelled
dangerously of halogen compounds, and scratched his shoulder, right
through his space-tunic, against something that vibrated as he touched
it.

McCray had no idea where he was, and no way to find out.

Not only was he in darkness, but in utter silence as well. No. Not
quite utter silence.

Somewhere, just at the threshold of his senses, there was something
like a voice. He could not quite hear it, but it was there. He sat as
still as he could, listening; it remained elusive.

Probably it was only an illusion.

But the room itself was hard fact. McCray swore violently and out loud.

It was crazy and impossible. There simply was no way for him to get
from a warm, bright navigator's cubicle on _Starship Jodrell Bank_ to
this damned, dark, dismal hole of a place where everything was out to
hurt him and nothing explained what was going on. He cried aloud in
exasperation: "If I could only _see_!"

He tripped and fell against something that was soft, slimy and, like
baker's dough, not at all resilient.

A flickering halo of pinkish light appeared. He sat up, startled. He
was looking at something that resembled a suit of medieval armor.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was, he saw in a moment, not armor but a spacesuit. But what was the
light? And what were these other things in the room?

Wherever he looked, the light danced along with his eyes. It was like
having tunnel vision or wearing blinders. He could see what he was
looking at, but he could see nothing else. And the things he could
see made no sense. A spacesuit, yes; he knew that he could construct
a logical explanation for that with no trouble--maybe a subspace
meteorite striking the _Jodrell Bank_, an explosion, himself knocked
out, brought here in a suit ... well, it was an explanation with more
holes than fabric, like a fisherman's net, but at least it was rational.

How to explain a set of Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire?_ A space-ax? Or the old-fashioned child's rocking-chair, the
chemistry set--or, most of all, the scrap of gaily printed fabric
that, when he picked it up, turned out to be a girl's scanty bathing
suit? It was slightly reassuring, McCray thought, to find that most of
the objects were more or less familiar. Even the child's chair--why,
he'd had one more or less like that himself, long before he was old
enough to go to school. But what were they doing here?

Not everything he saw was familiar. The walls of the room itself were
strange. They were not metal or plaster or knotty pine; they were
not papered, painted or overlaid with stucco. They seemed to be made
of some sort of hard organic compound, perhaps a sort of plastic or
processed cellulose. It was hard to tell colors in the pinkish light.
But they seemed to have none. They were "neutral"--the color of aged
driftwood or unbleached cloth.

Three of the walls were that way, and the floor and ceiling. The fourth
wall was something else. Areas in it had the appearance of gratings;
from them issued the pungent, distasteful halogen odor. They might be
ventilators, he thought; but if so the air they brought in was worse
than what he already had.

McCray was beginning to feel more confident. It was astonishing how a
little light made an impossible situation bearable, how quickly his
courage flowed back when he could see again.

He stood still, thinking. Item, a short time ago--subjectively it
seemed to be minutes--he had been aboard the _Jodrell Bank_ with
nothing more on his mind than completing his check-sighting and meeting
one of the female passengers for coffee. Item, apart from being
shaken up and--he admitted it--scared damn near witless, he did not
seem to be hurt. Item, wherever he was now, it became, not so much what
had happened to him, but what had happened to the ship?

He allowed that thought to seep into his mind. Suppose there had been
an accident to the _Jodrell Bank_.

He could, of course, be dead. All this could be the fantasies of a
cooling brain.

McCray grinned into the pink-lit darkness. The thought had somehow
refreshed him, like icewater between rounds, and with a clearing head
he remembered what a spacesuit was good for.

It held a radio.

He pressed the unsealing tabs, slipped his hand into the vacant chest
of the suit and pulled out the hand mike. "This is Herrell McCray," he
said, "calling the _Jodrell Bank_."

No response. He frowned. "This is Herrell McCray, calling _Jodrell
Bank_.

"Herrell McCray, calling anybody, come in, please."

But there was no answer.

Thoughtfully he replaced the microphone. This was ultrawave radio,
something more than a million times faster than light, with a range
measured, at least, in hundreds of light-years. If there was no answer,
he was a good long way from anywhere.

Of course, the thing might not be operating.

He reached for the microphone again--

He cried aloud.

The pinkish lights went out. He was in the dark again, worse dark than
before.

For before the light had gone, McCray had seen what had escaped
his eyes before. The suit and the microphone were clear enough in
the pinkish glimmer; but the hand--his own hand, cupped to hold the
microphone--he had not seen at all. Nor his arm. Nor, in one fleeting
moment of study, his chest.

McCray could not see any part of his own body at all.


                                  II

Someone else could.

Someone was watching Herrell McCray, with the clinical fascination
of a biochemist observing the wigglings of paramecia in a new
antibiotic--and with the prayerful emotions of a starving, shipwrecked,
sailor, watching the inward bobbing drift of a wave-born cask that
_may_ contain food.

Suppose you call him "Hatcher" (and suppose you call it a "him.")
Hatcher was not exactly male, because his race had no true males; but
it did have females and he was certainly not that. Hatcher did not in
any way look like a human being, but they had features in common.

If Hatcher and McCray had somehow managed to strike up an acquaintance,
they might have got along very well. Hatcher, like McCray, was an
adventurous soul, young, able, well-learned in the technical sciences
of his culture. Both enjoyed games--McCray baseball, poker and
three-dimensional chess; Hatcher a number of sports which defy human
description. Both held positions of some importance--considering their
ages--in the affairs of their respective worlds.

Physically they were nothing alike. Hatcher was a three-foot,
hard-shelled sphere of jelly. He had "arms" and "legs," but they were
not organically attached to "himself." They were snakelike things which
obeyed the orders of his brain as well as your mind can make your toes
curl; but they did not touch him directly. Indeed, they worked as well
a yard or a quarter-mile away as they did when, rarely, they rested
in the crevices they had been formed from in his "skin." At greater
distances they worked less well, for reasons irrelevant to the Law of
Inverse Squares.

Hatcher's principal task at this moment was to run the "probe team"
which had McCray under observation, and he was more than a little
excited. His members, disposed about the room where he had sent them on
various errands, quivered and shook a little; yet they were the calmest
limbs in the room; the members of the other team workers were in a
state of violent commotion.

The probe team had had a shock.

"Paranormal powers," muttered Hatcher's second in command, and the
others mumbled agreement. Hatcher ordered silence, studying the
specimen from Earth.

After a long moment he turned his senses from the Earthman.
"Incredible--but it's true enough," he said. "I'd better report. Watch
him," he added, but that was surely unnecessary. Their job was to
watch McCray, and they would do their job; and even more, not one of
them could have looked away to save his life from the spectacle of
a creature as odd and, from their point of view, hideously alien as
Herrell McCray.

       *       *       *       *       *

Hatcher hurried through the halls of the great buried structure in
which he worked, toward the place where the supervising council of all
probes would be in permanent session. They admitted him at once.

Hatcher identified himself and gave a quick, concise report:

"The subject recovered consciousness a short time ago and began to
inspect his enclosure. His method of doing so was to put his own
members in physical contact with the various objects in the enclosure.
After observing him do this for a time we concluded he might be unable
to see and so we illuminated his field of vision for him.

"This appeared to work well for a time. He seemed relatively
undisturbed. However, he then reverted to physical-contact,
manipulating certain appurtenances of an artificial skin we had
provided for him.

"He then began to vibrate the atmosphere by means of resonating organs
in his breathing passage.

"Simultaneously, the object he was holding, attached to the artificial
skin, was discovered to be generating paranormal forces."

The supervising council rocked with excitement. "You're sure?" demanded
one of the councilmen.

"Yes, sir. The staff is preparing a technical description of the forces
now, but I can say that they are electromagnetic vibrations modulating
a carrier wave of very high speed, and in turn modulated by the
vibrations of the atmosphere caused by the subject's own breathing."

"Fantastic," breathed the councillor, in a tone of dawning hope. "How
about communicating with him, Hatcher? Any progress?"

"Well ... not much, sir. He suddenly panicked. We don't know why; but
we thought we'd better pull back and let him recover for a while."

The council conferred among itself for a moment, Hatcher waiting. It
was not really a waste of time for him; with the organs he had left in
the probe-team room, he was in fairly close touch with what was going
on--knew that McCray was once again fumbling among the objects in the
dark, knew that the team-members had tried illuminating the room for
him briefly and again produced the rising panic.

Still, Hatcher fretted. He wanted to get back.

"Stop fidgeting," commanded the council leader abruptly. "Hatcher, you
are to establish communication at once."

"But, sir...." Hatcher swung closer, his thick skin quivering slightly;
he would have gestured if he had brought members with him to gesture
with. "We've done everything we dare. We've made the place homey
for him--" actually, what he said was more like, _we've warmed the
biophysical nuances of his enclosure_--"and tried to guess his needs;
and we're frightening him half to death. We _can't_ go faster. This
creature is in no way similar to us, you know. He relies on paranormal
forces--heat, light, kinetic energy--for his life. His chemistry is not
ours, his processes of thought are not ours, his entire organism is
closer to the inanimate rocks of a sea-bottom than to ourselves."

"Understood, Hatcher. In your first report you stated these creatures
were intelligent."

"Yes, sir. But not in our way."

"But in _a_ way, and you must learn that way. I know." One lobster-claw
shaped member drifted close to the councillor's body and raised itself
in an admonitory gesture. "You want time. But we don't have time,
Hatcher. Yours is not the only probe team working. The Central Masses
team has just turned in a most alarming report."

"Have they secured a subject?" Hatcher demanded jealously.

The councillor paused. "Worse than that, Hatcher. I am afraid their
subjects have secured one of them. One of them is missing."

There was a moment's silence. Frozen, Hatcher could only wait. The
council room was like a tableau in a museum until the councillor spoke
again, each council member poised over his locus-point, his members
drifting about him.

Finally the councillor said, "I speak for all of us, I think. If the
Old Ones have seized one of our probers our time margin is considerably
narrowed. Indeed, we may not have any time at all. You must do
everything you can to establish communication with your subject."

"But the danger to the specimen--" Hatcher protested automatically.

"--is no greater," said the councillor, "than the danger to every one
of us if we do not find allies _now_."

       *       *       *       *       *

Hatcher returned to his laboratory gloomily.

It was just like the council to put the screws on; they had a
reputation for demanding results at any cost--even at the cost of
destroying the only thing you had that would make results possible.

Hatcher did not like the idea of endangering the Earthman. It cannot
be said that he was emotionally involved; it was not pity or sympathy
that caused him to regret the dangers in moving too fast toward
communication. Not even Hatcher had quite got over the revolting
physical differences between the Earthman and his own people. But
Hatcher did not want him destroyed. It had been difficult enough
getting him here.

Hatcher checked through the members that he had left with the rest of
his team and discovered that there were no immediate emergencies, so he
took time to eat. In Hatcher's race this was accomplished in ways not
entirely pleasant to Earthmen. A slit in the lower hemisphere of his
body opened, like a purse, emitting a thin, pussy, fetid fluid which
Hatcher caught and poured into a disposal trough at the side of the
eating room. He then stuffed the slit with pulpy vegetation the texture
of kelp; it closed, and his body was supplied with nourishment for
another day.

He returned quickly to the room.

His second in command was busy, but one of the other team workers
reported--nothing new--and asked about Hatcher's appearance before the
council. Hatcher passed the question off. He considered telling his
staff about the disappearance of the Central Masses team member, but
decided against it. He had not been told it was secret. On the other
hand, he had not been told it was not. Something of this importance was
not lightly to be gossiped about. For endless generations the threat
of the Old Ones had hung over his race, those queer, almost mythical
beings from the Central Masses of the galaxy. One brush with them, in
ages past, had almost destroyed Hatcher's people. Only by running and
hiding, bearing one of their planets with them and abandoning it--with
its population--as a decoy, had they arrived at all.

Now they had detected mapping parties of the Old Ones dangerously near
the spiral arm of the galaxy in which their planet was located, they
had begun the Probe Teams to find some way of combating them, or of
fleeing again.

But it seemed that the Probe Teams themselves might be betraying their
existence to their enemies--

"Hatcher!"

The call was urgent; he hurried to see what it was about. It was his
second in command, very excited. "What is it?" Hatcher demanded.

"Wait...."

Hatcher was patient; he knew his assistant well. Obviously something
was about to happen. He took the moment to call his members back to
him for feeding; they dodged back to their niches on his skin, fitted
themselves into their vestigial slots, poured back their wastes into
his own circulation and ingested what they needed from the meal he had
just taken.... "Now!" cried the assistant. "Look!"

At what passed among Hatcher's people for a viewing console an image
was forming. Actually it was the assistant himself who formed it, not a
cathode trace or projected shadow; but it showed what it was meant to
show.

Hatcher was startled. "Another one! And--is it a different species? Or
merely a different sex?"

"Study the probe for yourself," the assistant invited.

Hatcher studied him frostily; his patience was not, after all, endless.
"No matter," he said at last. "Bring the other one in."

And then, in a completely different mood, "We may need him badly. We
may be in the process of killing our first one now."

"Killing him, Hatcher?"

Hatcher rose and shook himself, his mindless members floating away like
puppies dislodged from suck. "Council's orders," he said. "We've got to
go into Stage Two of the project at once."


                                  III

Before Stage Two began, or before Herrell McCray realized it had begun,
he had an inspiration.

The dark was absolute, but he remembered where the spacesuit had been
and groped his way to it and, yes, it had what all spacesuits had to
have. It had a light. He found the toggle that turned it on and pressed
it.

Light. White, flaring, Earthly light, that showed everything--even
himself.

"God bless," he said, almost beside himself with joy. Whatever that
pinkish, dancing halo had been, it had thrown him into a panic; now
that he could see his own hand again, he could blame the weird effects
on some strange property of the light.

At the moment he heard the click that was the beginning of Stage Two.

He switched off the light and stood for a moment, listening.

For a second he thought he heard the far-off voice, quiet, calm and
almost hopeless, that he had sensed hours before; but then that was
gone. Something else was gone. Some faint mechanical sound that had
hardly registered at the time, but was not missing. And there was,
perhaps, a nice new sound that had not been there before; a very
faint, an almost inaudible elfin hiss.

McCray switched the light on and looked around. There seemed to be no
change.

And yet, surely, it was warmer in here.

He could see no difference; but perhaps, he thought, he could smell
one. The unpleasant halogen odor from the grating was surely stronger
now. He stood there, perplexed.

A tinny little voice from the helmet of the space suit said sharply,
amazement in its tone, "McCray, is that you? Where the devil are you
calling from?"

He forgot smell, sound and temperature and leaped for the suit. "This
is Herrell McCray," he cried. "I'm in a room of some sort, apparently
on a planet of approximate Earth mass. I don't know--"

"McCray!" cried the tiny voice in his ear. "Where are you? This is
_Jodrell Bank_ calling. Answer, please!"

"I _am_ answering, damn it," he roared. "What took you so long?"

"Herrell McCray," droned the tiny voice in his ear, "Herrell McCray,
Herrell McCray, this is _Jodrell Bank_ responding to your message,
acknowledge please. Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray...."

It kept on, and on.

McCray took a deep breath and thought. Something was wrong. Either they
didn't hear him, which meant the radio wasn't transmitting, or--no.
That was not it; they _had_ heard him, because they were responding.
But it seemed to take them so long....

Abruptly his face went white. Took them so long! He cast back in his
mind, questing for a fact, unable to face its implications. When was
it he called them? Two hours ago? Three?

Did that mean--did it _possibly_ mean--that there was a lag of an hour
or two each way? Did it, for example, mean that at the speed of his
suit's pararadio, millions of times faster than light, it took _hours_
to get a message to the ship and back?

And if so ... where in the name of heaven was he?

       *       *       *       *       *

Herrell McCray was a navigator, which is to say, a man who has learned
to trust the evidence of mathematics and instrument readings beyond the
guesses of his "common sense." When _Jodrell Bank_, hurtling faster
than light in its voyage between stars, made its regular position
check, common sense was a liar. Light bore false witness. The line of
sight was trustworthy directly forward and directly after--sometimes
not even then--and it took computers, sensing their data through
instruments, to comprehend a star bearing and convert three fixes into
a position.

If the evidence of his radio contradicted common sense, common sense
was wrong. Perhaps it was impossible to believe what the radio's
message implied; but it was not necessary to "believe," only to act.

McCray thumbed down the transmitter button and gave a concise report
of his situation and his guesses. "I don't know how I got here. I
don't know how long I've been gone, since I was unconscious for a
time. However, if the transmission lag is a reliable indication--" he
swallowed and went on--"I'd estimate I am something more than five
hundred light-years away from you at this moment. That's all I have to
say, except for one more word: Help."

He grinned sourly and released the button. The message was on its way,
and it would be hours before he could have a reply. Therefore he had to
consider what to do next.

He mopped his brow. With the droning, repetitious call from the ship
finally quiet, the room was quiet again. And warm.

Very warm, he thought tardily; and more than that. The halogen stench
was strong in his nostrils again.

Hurriedly McCray scrambled into the suit. By the time he was sealed
down he was coughing from the bottom of his lungs, deep, tearing rasps
that pained him, uncontrollable. Chlorine or fluorine, one of them was
in the air he had been breathing. He could not guess where it had come
from; but it was ripping his lungs out.

He flushed the interior of the suit out with a reckless disregard for
the wastage of his air reserve, holding his breath as much as he could,
daring only shallow gasps that made him retch and gag. After a long
time he could breathe, though his eyes were spilling tears.

He could see the fumes in the room now. The heat was building up.

Automatically--now that he had put it on and so started its
servo-circuits operating--the suit was cooling him. This was a
deep-space suit, regulation garb when going outside the pressure hull
of an FTL ship. It was good up to at least five hundred degrees in thin
air, perhaps three or four hundred in dense. In thin air or in space it
was the elastic joints and couplings that depolymerized when the heat
grew too great; in dense air, with conduction pouring energy in faster
than the cooling coils could suck it out and hurl it away, it was the
refrigerating equipment that broke down.

McCray had no way of knowing just how hot it was going to get. Nor,
for that matter, had the suit been designed to operate in a corrosive
medium.

All in all it was time for him to do something.

       *       *       *       *       *

Among the debris on the floor, he remembered, was a five-foot space-ax,
tungsten-steel blade and springy aluminum shaft.

McCray caught it up and headed for the door. It felt good in his
gauntlets, a rewarding weight; any weapon straightens the back of the
man who holds it, and McCray was grateful for this one. With something
concrete to do he could postpone questioning. Never mind why he had
been brought here; never mind how. Never mind what he would, or could,
do next; all those questions could recede into the background of his
mind while he swung the ax and battered his way out of this poisoned
oven.

_Crash-clang!_ The double jolt ran up the shaft of the ax, through his
gauntlets and into his arm; but he was making progress, he could see
the plastic--or whatever it was--of the door. It was chipping out. Not
easily, very reluctantly; but flaking out in chips that left a white
powdery residue.

At this rate, he thought grimly, he would be an hour getting through
it. Did he have an hour?

But it did not take an hour. One blow was luckier than the rest; it
must have snapped the lock mechanism. The door shook and slid ajar.
McCray got the thin of the blade into the crack and pried it wide.

He was in another room, maybe a hall, large and bare.

McCray put the broad of his back against the broken door and pressed it
as nearly closed as he could; it might not keep the gas and heat out,
but it would retard them.

The room was again unlighted--at least to McCray's eyes. There was not
even that pink pseudo-light that had baffled him; here was nothing
but the beam of his suit lamp. What it showed was cryptic. There were
evidences of use: shelves, boxy contraptions that might have been
cupboards, crude level surfaces attached to the walls that might have
been workbenches. Yet they were queerly contrived, for it was not
possible to guess from them much about the creatures who used them.
Some were near the floor, some at waist height, some even suspended
from the ceiling itself. A man would need a ladder to work at these
benches and McCray, staring, thought briefly of many-armed blind giants
or shapeless huge intelligent amoebae, and felt the skin prickle at the
back of his neck.

He tapped half-heartedly at one of the closed cupboards, and was not
surprised when it proved as refractory as the door. Undoubtedly he
could batter it open, but it was not likely that much would be left of
its contents when he was through; and there was the question of time.

But his attention was diverted by a gleam from one of the benches.
Metallic parts lay heaped in a pile. He poked at them with a
stiff-fingered gauntlet; they were oddly familiar. They were, he
thought, very much like the parts of a bullet-gun.

In fact, they were. He could recognize barrel, chamber, trigger, even
a couple of cartridges, neatly opened and the grains of powder stacked
beside them. It was an older, clumsier model than the kind he had seen
in survival locker, on the _Jodrell Bank_--and abruptly wished he were
carrying now--but it was a pistol. Another trophy, like the strange
assortment in the other room? He could not guess. But the others had
been more familiar; they all have come from his own ship. He was
prepared to swear that nothing like this antique had been aboard.

The drone began again in his ear, as it had at five-minute intervals
all along:

"Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray, this is _Jodrell Bank_
calling Herrell McCray...."

And louder, blaring, then fading to normal volume as the AVC circuits
toned the signal down, another voice. A woman's voice, crying out in
panic and fear: "_Jodrell Bank!_ Where are you? Help!"


                                  IV

Hatcher's second in command said: "He has got through the first
survival test. In fact, he broke his way out! What next?"

"Wait!" Hatcher ordered sharply. He was watching the new specimen and
a troublesome thought had occurred to him. The new one was female and
seemed to be in pain; but it was not the pain that disturbed Hatcher,
it was something far more immediate to his interests.

"I think," he said slowly, "that they are in contact."

His assistant vibrated startlement.

"I know," Hatcher said, "but watch. Do you see? He is going straight
toward her."

Hatcher, who was not human, did not possess truly human emotions; but
he did feel amazement when he was amazed, and fear when there was
cause to be afraid. These specimens, obtained with so much difficulty,
needed so badly, were his responsibility. He knew the issues involved
much better than any of his helpers. They could only be surprised at
the queer antics of the aliens with attached limbs and strange powers.
Hatcher knew that this was not a freak show, but a matter of life and
death. He said, musing:

"This new one, I cannot communicate with her, but I get--almost--a
whisper, now and then. The first one, the male, nothing. But this
female is perhaps not quite mute."

"Then shall we abandon him and work with her, forgetting the first one?"

Hatcher hesitated. "No," he said at last. "The male is responding well.
Remember that when last this experiment was done every subject died; he
is alive at least. But I am wondering. We can't quite communicate with
the female--"

"But?"

"But I'm not sure that others can't."

       *       *       *       *       *

The woman's voice was at such close range that McCray's suit radio made
a useful RDF set. He located her direction easily enough, shielding the
tiny built-in antenna with the tungsten-steel blade of the ax, while
she begged him to hurry. Her voice was heavily accented, with some
words in a language he did not recognize. She seemed to be in shock.

McCray was hardly surprised at that; he had been close enough to shock
himself. He tried to reassure her as he searched for a way out of the
hall, but in the middle of a word her voice stopped.

He hesitated, hefting the ax, glancing back at the way he had come.
There had to be a way out, even if it meant chopping through a wall.

When he turned around again there was a door. It was oddly shaped and
unlike the door he had hewn through, but clearly a door all the same,
and it was open.

McCray regarded it grimly. He went back in his memory with meticulous
care. Had he not looked at, this very spot a matter of moments before?
He had. And had there been an open door then? There had not. There
hadn't been even a shadowy outline of the three-sided, uneven opening
that stood there now.

Still, it led in the proper direction. McCray added one more
inexplicable fact to his file and walked through. He was in another
hall--or tunnel--rising quite steeply to the right. By his reckoning it
was the proper direction. He labored up it, sweating under the weight
of the suit, and found another open door, this one round, and behind
it--

Yes, there was the woman whose voice he had heard.

It was a woman, all right. The voice had been so strained that he
hadn't been positive. Even now, short black hair might not have proved
it, and she was lying face down but the waist and hips were a woman's,
even though she wore a bulky, quilted suit of coveralls.

He knelt beside her and gently turned her face.

She was unconscious. Broad, dark face, with no make-up; she was
apparently in her late thirties. She appeared to be Chinese.

She breathed, a little raggedly but without visible discomfort; her
face was relaxed as though she were sleeping. She did not rouse as he
moved her.

He realized she was breathing the air of the room they were in.

His instant first thought was that she was in danger of asphyxiation;
he started to leap up to get, and put her into, the small, flimsy space
suit he saw slumped in a corner. At second thought he realized that
she would not be breathing so comfortably if the air were full of the
poisonous reek that had driven him out of the first room.

There was an obvious conclusion to be drawn from that; perhaps he could
economize on his own air reserve. Tentatively he cracked the seal of
his faceplate and took a cautious breath. The faint reek of halogens
was still there, but it was not enough even to make his eyes water, and
the temperature of the air was merely pleasantly warm.

He shook her, but she did not wake.

He stood up and regarded her thoughtfully. It was a disappointment.
Her voice had given him hope of a companion, someone to talk things
over with, to compare notes--someone who, if not possessing any more
answers than himself, could at least serve as a sounding-board in the
give-and-take of discussion that might make some sort of sense out of
the queerness that permeated this place.

What he had instead was another burden to carry, for she was unable to
care for herself and surely he could not leave her in this condition.

       *       *       *       *       *

He slipped off the helmet absently and pressed the buttons that turned
off the suit's cooling units, looking around the chamber. It was bare
except for a litter of irrelevant human articles--much like the one in
which he himself had first appeared, except that the articles were not
_Jodrell Bank's_. A woven cane screen, some cooking utensils, a machine
like a desk calculator, some books--he picked up one of the books and
glanced at it. It was printed on coarse paper, and the text was in
ideographs, Chinese, perhaps; he did not know Oriental languages.

McCray knew that the _Jodrell Bank_ was not the only FTL vessel in this
volume of space. The Betelgeuse run was a busy one, as FTL shipping
lanes went. Almost daily departures from some point on Earth to one of
the colonies, with equal traffic in the other direction.

Of course, if the time-lag in communication did not lie, he was no
longer anywhere within that part of the sky; Betelgeuse was only a few
hundred light-years from Sol, and subspace radio covered that distance
in something like fifty minutes. But suppose the woman came from
another ship; perhaps a Singapore or Tokyo vessel, on the same run.
She might easily have been trapped as he was trapped. And if she were
awake, he could find out from her what had happened, and thus learn
something that might be of use.

Although it was hard to see what might be of use in these most
unprecedented and unpleasant circumstances.

The drone from _Jodrell Bank_ began again: "Herrell McCray, Herrell
McCray, Herrell McCray, this is _Jodrell Bank_ responding--"

He turned the volume down but did not dare turn it off. He had lost
track of time and couldn't guess when they would respond to his last
message. He needed to hear that response when it came. Meanwhile, what
about his fellow-captive?

Her suit was only a flimsy work-about model, as airtight as his but
without the bracing required for building jet propulsors into it. It
contained air reserves enough, and limited water; but neither food nor
emergency medical supplies.

McCray had both of these, of course. It was merely one more reason why
he could not abandon her and go on ... if, that is, he could find some
reason for going in one direction preferably to another, and if a wall
would conveniently open again to let him go there.

He could give her an injection of a stimulant, he mused. Would that
improve the situation? Not basically, he decided, with some regret.
Sleep was a need, not a luxury; it would not help her to be awakened
chemically, when body was demonstrating its need for rest by refusing
to wake to a call. Anyway, if she were not seriously injured she would
undoubtedly wake of her own accord before long.

He checked pulse and eye-pupils; everything normal, no evidence of
bleeding or somatic shock.

So much for that. At least he had made one simple decision on his own,
he thought with grim humor. To that extent he had reestablished his
mastery of his own fate, and it made him feel a touch better.

Perhaps he could make some more. What about trying to find a way out of
this place, for instance?

       *       *       *       *       *

It was highly probable that they would not be able to stay here
indefinitely, that was the first fact to take into account. Either his
imagination was jumpy, or the reek of halogens was a bit stronger. In
any case there was no guarantee that this place would remain habitable
any longer than the last, and he had to reckon with the knowledge that
a spacesuit's air reserve was not infinite. These warrens might prove a
death trap.

McCray paused, leaning on the haft of his ax, wondering how much of
that was reason and how much panic. He knew that he wanted, more than
anything to get out of this place, to see sky and stars, to be where no
skulking creatures behind false panels in the walls, or peering through
televiewers concealed in the furnishings, could trick and trap him. But
did he have any reason to believe that he would be better off somewhere
else? Might it not be even that this place was a sort of vivarium
maintained for his survival--that the leak of poison gases and heat in
the first room was not a deliberate thrust at his safety, but a failure
of the shielding that alone could keep him alive?

He didn't know, and in the nature of things could not. But
paradoxically the thought that escape might increase his danger made
him all the more anxious to escape. He wanted to know. If death
was waiting for him outside his chamber, McCray wanted to face
it--now--while he was still in good physical shape.

While he was still sane. For there was a limit to how many phenomena
he could store away in the back of his mind; sooner or later the
contradictions, the puzzles, the fears would have to be faced.

Yet what could he do with the woman? Conceivably he could carry her;
but could he also carry her suit? He did not dare take her without
it. It would be no kindness to plunge her into another atmosphere of
poison, and watch her die because he had taken her from her only hope
of safety. Yet the suit weighed at least fifty pounds. His own was
slightly more; the girl, say, a hundred and thirty. It added up to more
mass than he could handle, at least for more than a few dozen yards.

The speaker in his helmet said suddenly: "Herrell McCray, this is
_Jodrell Bank_. Your transmission received. We are vectoring and
ranging your signal. Stand by. We will call again in ten minutes." And,
in a different tone: "God help you, Mac. What the devil happened to
you?"

It was a good question. McCray swore uselessly because he didn't know
the answer.

He took wry pleasure in imagining what was going on aboard _Jodrell
Bank_ at that moment. At least not all the bewilderment was his own.
They would be utterly baffled. As far as they were concerned, their
navigator had been on the bridge at one moment and the next moment
gone, tracelessly. That in itself was a major puzzle; the only way off
an FTL ship in flight was in the direction called "suicide." That would
have been their assumption, all right, as soon as they realized he was
gone and checked the ship to make sure he was not for some reason
wandering about in a cargo hold or unconscious in a closet after some
hard-to-imagine attack from another crewman. They would have thought
that somehow, crazily, he had got into a suit--there was the suit--and
jumped out of a lock. But there would have been no question of going
back to look for him. True, they could have tracked his subspace radio
if he had used it. But what would have been the good of that? The first
question, an all but unanswerable one, would be how long ago he had
jumped. Even if they knew that, _Jodrell Bank_, making more than five
hundred times light-speed, could not be stopped in fewer than a dozen
light-years. They could hardly hope to return to even approximately the
location in space where he might have jumped; and there was no hope
of reaching a position, stopping, casting about, starting again--the
accelerations were too enormous, a man too tiny a dust-mote.

And, of course, he would have been dead in the first place, anyway. The
transition from FTL drive to normal space was instantly fatal except
within the protecting shield of a ship's engines.

So they would have given him up and, hours later--or days, for he had
lost track of time--they would have received his message. What would
they make of that?

He didn't know. After all, he hardly knew what he made of it himself.

The woman still slept. The way back was still open. He could tell
by sniffing the air that the poisons in the atmosphere were still
gaining. Ahead there was nothing but blank walls, and the clutter of
useless equipment littering the floor. Stolidly McCray closed his mind
and waited.

The signal came at last.

"Mac, we have verified your position." The voice was that of Captain
Tillinger, strained and shaking. "I don't know how you got there, but
unless the readings lie you're the hell of a long way off. The bearing
is identical with Messier object M-42 and the distance--" raggedly--"is
compatible. About a thousand light-years from us, Mac. One way or
another, you've been kidnaped. I--I--"

The voice hesitated, unable to say what it could not accept as fact but
could not deny. "I think," it managed at last, "that we've finally come
across those super-beings in space that we've wondered about."

       *       *       *       *       *

Hatcher's detached limbs were quivering with excitement--and with more
than excitement, because he was afraid. He was trying to conceal from
the others just how afraid he was.

His second in command reported: "We have the second subject out of
consciousness. How long do you want us to keep her that way?"

"Until I tell you otherwise! How about the prime subject?"

"We can't tell, Hatcher. But you were right. He is in communication
with others, it seems, and by paranormal means." Hatcher noted the
dismay in what his assistant said. He understood the dismay well
enough. It was one thing to work on a project involving paranormal
forces as an exercise in theory. It was something else entirely to see
them in operation.

But there was more cause for dismay than that, and Hatcher alone knew
just how bad the situation was. He summoned one of his own members to
him and impressed on it a progress report for the Council. He sent it
floating through the long warrens of his people's world, ordered his
assistants back to their work and closed in his thoughts to consider
what had happened.

These two creatures, with their command of forces in the
paranormal--i.e., the electromagnetic--spectrum, seemed able to
survive in the environments prepared for them. That was step one. No
previous team had done as well. This was not the first time a probe
team of his race had snatched a warmblooded biped from a spaceship for
study--because their operation forces, psionic in nature, operated in
non-Euclidean ways, it was easiest for them to make contact with the
crew of a ship in the non-Euclidean space of FTL drive.

But it was the first time that the specimens had survived. He
reviewed the work they had already done with the male specimen. He
had shown himself unable to live in the normal atmospheric conditions
of Hatcher's world; but that was to be expected, after all, and
the creature had been commendably quick about getting out of a bad
environment. Probably they had blundered in illuminating the scene for
him, Hatcher conceded. He didn't know how badly he had blundered, for
the concept of "light" from a general source, illuminating not only
what the mind wished to see but irrelevant matter as well, had never
occurred to Hatcher or any of his race; all of their senses operated
through the mind itself, and what to them was "light" was a sort
of focusing of attention. But although something about that episode
which Hatcher failed to understand had gone wrong, the specimen had
not been seriously harmed by it. The specimen was doing well. Probably
they could now go to the hardest test of all, the one which would mean
success or failure. Probably they could so modify the creature as to
make direct communication possible.

And the other specimen?

Hatcher would have frowned, if he had had brow muscles to shape such
an expression--or a brow to be shaped. The female specimen was the
danger. His own people knew how to shield their thoughts. This one
evidently did not. It was astonishing that the Old Ones had not already
encountered these bipeds, so loosely guarded was their radiation--when
they radiated at all, of course, for only a few of them seemed to
possess any psionic power worth mentioning.

Hatcher hastily drove that thought from his mind, for what he proposed
to do with the male specimen was to give him that power.

And yet there was no choice for Hatcher's people, because they were
faced with disaster. Hatcher, through his communications from the
Council, knew how close the disaster was. When one of the probers from
the Central Masses team disappeared, the only conclusion that could be
drawn was the Old Ones had discovered them. They needed allies; more,
they needed allies who had control of the electromagnetic forces that
made the Old Ones so potent and so feared.

In the male and female they had snatched out of space they might have
found those allies. But another thought was in Hatcher's mind: Suppose
the Old Ones found them too?

Hatcher made up his mind. He could not delay any longer.

"Open the way to the surface," he ordered. "As soon as possible, take
both of them to where we can work."

       *       *       *       *       *

The object Captain Tillinger had called "M-42" was no stranger to
Herrell McCray. It was the Great Nebula in Orion, in Earth's telescopes
a fuzzy patch of light, in cold fact a great and glowing cloud of
gas. M-42 was not an external galaxy, like most of the "nebulae"
in Messier's catalogue, but it was nothing so tiny as a single sun
either. Its hydrogen mass spanned dozens of light-years. Imbedded in
it--growing in it, as they fed on the gas that surrounded them--were
scores of hot, bright new suns.

_New_ suns. In all the incongruities that swarmed around him McCray
took time to consider that one particular incongruity. The suns of
the Orion gas cloud were of the spectral class called "B"--young
suns, less than a thousandth as old as a Sol. They simply had not
been in existence long enough to own stable planetary systems--much
less planets which themselves were old enough to have cooled, brewed
chemical complexes and thus in time produced life. But surely he was on
a planet....

Wasn't he?

McCray breathed a deep sigh and for one more time turned his mind away
from unprofitable speculations. The woman stirred slightly. McCray
knelt to look at her; then, on quick impulse, opened his medical kit,
took out a single-shot capsule of a stimulant and slipped it neatly
into the exposed vein of her arm.

In about two minutes she would be awake. Good enough, thought McCray;
at least he would have someone to talk to. Now if only they could find
a way out of this place. If a door would open, as the other door had,
and--

He paused, staring.

There was another door. Open.

He felt himself swaying, threw out an arm and realized that he
was ... falling? Floating? Moving toward the door, somehow, not as
though he were being dragged, not as though he were walking, but
surely and rather briskly moving along.

His feet were not touching the ground.

It wasn't a volitional matter. His intentions had nothing to do with
it. He flailed out, and touched nothing; nor did he slow his motion at
all. He fought against it, instinctively; and then reason took over and
he stopped.

The woman's form lifted from the floor ahead of him. She was still
unconscious. From the clutter on the floor, her lightweight space suit
rose, too; suit and girl, they floated ahead of him, toward the door
and out.

McCray cried out and tried to run after them. His legs flailed and, of
course, touched nothing; but it did seem that he was moving faster. The
woman and her suit were disappearing around a bend, but he was right
behind them.

He became conscious of the returning reek of gases. He flipped up the
plate of his helmet and lunged at the girl, miraculously caught her in
one hand and, straining, caught the suit with the other.

Stuffing her into the suit was hard, awkward work, like dressing a
doll that is too large for its garments; but he managed it, closed her
helmet, saw the flexible parts of her suit bulge out slightly as its
automatic pressure regulators filled it with air.

They drove along, faster and faster, until they came to a great portal,
and out into the blinding radiance of a molten copper sky.

       *       *       *       *       *

Gathered in a circle were a score or more of Hatcher's people.

McCray didn't know they were Hatcher's people, of course. He did not
know even that they were animate beings, for they lacked all the
features of animals that he had been used to. No eyes. No faces. Their
detached members, bobbing about seemingly at random, did not appear to
have any relation to the irregular spheres that were their owners.

The woman got unevenly to her feet, her faceplate staring toward the
creatures. McCray heard a smothered exclamation in his suit-phones.

"Are you all right?" he demanded sharply. The great crystal eye turned
round to look at him.

"Oh, the man who spoke to me." Her voice was taut but controlled. The
accent was gone; her control was complete. "I am Ann Mei-Ling, of the
_Woomara_. What are--those?"

McCray said, "Our kidnappers, I guess. They don't look like much, do
they?"

She laughed shakily, without answering. The creatures seemed to be
waiting for something, McCray thought; if indeed they were creatures
and not machines or--or whatever one might expect to find, in the
impossible event of being cast away on an improbable planet of an
unexplored sun. He touched the woman's helmet reassuringly and walked
toward the aliens, raising his arms.

"Hello," he said. "I am Herrell McCray."

He waited.

He half turned; the woman watching him. "I don't know what to do next,"
he confessed.

"Sit down," she said suddenly. He stared. "No, you must! They want you
to sit down."

"I didn't hear--" he began, then shrugged. He sat down.

"Now lie stretched out and open your face mask."

"_Here?_ Listen--Ann--Miss Mei-Ling, whatever you said your name was!
Don't you feel the heat? If I crack my mask--"

"But you must." She spoke very confidently. "It is _s'in fo_---what do
you call it--telepathy, I think. But I can hear them. They want you to
open your mask. No, it won't kill you. They understand what they are
doing."

She hesitated, then said, with less assurance, "They need us, McCray.
There is something ... I am not sure, but something bad. They need
help, and think you can give it to them. So open your helmet as they
wish, please."

McCray closed his eyes and grimaced; but there was no help for it, he
had no better ideas. And anyway, he thought, he could close it again
quickly enough if these things had guessed wrong.

The creatures moved purposefully toward McCray, and he found himself
the prisoner of a dozen unattached arms. Surprised, he struggled, but
helplessly; no, he would not be able to close the plate again!... But
the heat was no worse. Somehow they were shielding him.

A tiny member, like one of the unattached arms but much smaller,
writhed through the air toward him, hesitated over his eyes and
released something tinier still, something so small and so close that
McCray could not focus his eyes upon it. It moved deliberately toward
his face.

The woman was saying, as if to herself, "The thing they fear is--far
away, but--oh, no! My God!"

There was a terrible loud scream, but McCray was not quite sure he
heard it. It might have been his own, he thought crazily; for that tiny
floating thing had found his face and was burrowing deep inside; and
the pain was beyond belief.

       *       *       *       *       *

The pain was incredible. It was worse than anything he had ever felt,
and it grew ... and then it was gone.

What it was that the spheroidal aliens had done to his mind McCray had
no way of learning. He could only know that a door had been open. An
opaque screen was removed. He was free of his body.

He was more than free, he was extended--increased--enlarged. He was
inside the body of an alien, and the alien was in him. He was also
outside both, looking at them.

McCray had never felt anything like it in his life. It was a situation
without even a close analogue. He had had a woman in his arms, he had
been part of a family, he had shared the youthful sense of exploration
that comes in small, eager groups: These were the comparisons that came
to his mind. This was so much more than any of these things. He and the
alien--he and, he began to perceive, a number of aliens--were almost
inextricably mingled. Yet they were separate, as one strand of colored
thread in a ball of yarn is looped and knotted and intertwined with
every other strand, although it retains its own integrity. He was in
and among many minds, and outside them all. McCray thought: This is how
a god must feel.

       *       *       *       *       *

Hatcher would have laughed--if he had lips, larynx or mouth to laugh
with. He would have laughed in pure exultation, and, indeed, his second
in command recognized the marionette quivering of his detached limbs
as a shout of glee. "We've done it," cried the assistant, catching his
delight. "We've made the project work!"

"We've done a great deal more than that," exulted Hatcher. "Go to the
supervisors, report to them. Pass on the word to the Central Masses
probe. Maintain for the alien the pressure and temperature value he
needs--"

"And you, Hatcher?"

"I'm going with him--out in the open! I'm going to show him what _we_
need!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Hatcher. McCray recognized that this was a name--the name of the entity
closest to himself, the one that had somehow manipulated his forebrain
and released the mind from the prison of the skull. "Hatcher" was not a
word but an image, and in the image he saw a creature whose physical
shape was unpleasant, but whose instincts and hopes were enough like
his own to provide common ground.

He saw more than that. This Hatcher was trying to persuade him to move.
To venture farther. To come with him....

McCray allowed himself to be lead and at once he was outside not only
of his own body but of all bodies. He was free in space.

The entity that had been born of Herrell McCray was now larger than a
sun. He could see, all around him, the wonder and beauty of the great
gas cloud in which his body rested, on one tiny planet of one trivial
star. His sense of time was not changed from what it had been--he could
count the pulses of his own body, still thudding in what, however
remote, was his ear--but he could see things that were terribly slow
and vast. He could see the friction of the streamers of gas in the
cloud as light-pressure drove them outward. He could hear the subtle
emanations of ion clashing with hurtling ion. He could see the great
blue new suns tunneling through the cloud, building their strength
out of the diffuse contaminated hydrogen that made the Orion nebula,
leaving relatively clear "holes" behind them. He could see into the gas
and through it. He could perceive each star and gassy comet; and he
could behold the ordered magnificence of the galaxy of stars, and the
universe of galaxies, beyond.

The presence beside him was urging him to look beyond, into a denser,
richer region of suns. McCray, unsure of his powers, stretched toward
it--and recoiled.

There was something there which was terrifying, something cold and
restless that watched him come toward it with the eyes of a crouched
panther awaiting a deer.

The presence beside him felt the same terror, McCray knew. He was
grateful when Hatcher allowed him to look away from the central
clusters and return to the immediate neighborhood of his body.

Like a child's toy in a diminishing glass, McCray could see the planet
he had left.

But it was no planet. It was not a planet, but a great irregular sphere
of metal, honeycombed and warrened. He would have thought it a ship,
though huge, if it had had engines or instruments.... No. It _was_ a
ship. Hatcher beside him was proof that these creatures needed neither,
not in any Earthly sense, at least. They themselves were engines, with
their power to move matter apart from the intervention of other matter.
They themselves were instruments, through the sensing of force, that
was now within his own power.

A moment's hesitant practice, and McCray had the "planet" in the palm
of his hand--not a real palm, not a real hand; but it was there for his
inspection. He looked at it and within it and saw the interior nests of
Hatcher's folk, found the room where he had been brought, traced his
course to the surface, saw his own body in its spacesuit, saw beside it
the flaccid suit that had held the strange woman's body....

The suit was empty.

The suit was empty, and in the moment of that discovery McCray heard a
terrible wailing cry--not in his ears, in his mind--from the aliens
around him. The suit was empty. They discovered it the same moment
as he. It was wrong and it was dangerous; they were terrified. The
companion presence beside him receded into emptiness. In a moment
McCray was back in his own body, and the gathering members let him free.


                                  VI

Some hundreds of light-years away, the _Jodrell Bank_ was making up
lost time on its Betelgeuse run.

Herrell McCray swept the long line from Sol to Betelgeuse, with his
perceptions that were not his eyes and his touch that was not of
matter, until he found it. The giant ship, fastest and hugest of
mankind's star vessels, was to him a lumbering tiny beetle.

It held friends and something else--something his body needed--air and
water and food. McCray did not know what would happen to him if, while
his mind was out in the stars, his body died. But he was not anxious to
find out.

McCray had not tried moving his physical body, but with what had
been done to his brain he could now do anything within the powers of
Hatcher's people. As they had swept him from ship to planet, so he
could now hurl his body back from planet to ship. He flexed muscles
of his mind that had never been used before, and in a moment his body
was slumped on the floor of the _Jodrell Bank's_ observation bubble.
In another moment he was in his body, opening his eyes and looking out
into the astonished face of Chris Stoerer, his junior navigator. "God
in heaven," whispered Stoerer. "It's you!"

"It is," said McCray hoarsely, through lips that were parched and
cracked, sitting up and trying the muscles of the body. It ached. He
was bone-weary. "Give me a hand getting out of this suit, will you?"

It was not easy to be a mind in a body again, McCray discovered. Time
had stopped for him. He had been soaring the star-lanes in his released
mind for hours; but while his mind had been liberated, his body, back
on Hatcher's "planet," had continued its slow metabolism, its steady
devouring of its tissues, its inevitable progress toward death. When he
had returned to it he found its pulse erratic and its breathing ragged.
A grinding knot of hunger seethed in its stomach. Its muscles ached.

Whatever might become of his mind, it was clear that his body would die
if it were left unfed and uncared-for much longer. So he had brought it
back to the _Jodrell Bank_. He stood up and avoided Chris's questions.
"Let me get something to eat, and then get cleaned up a little." (He
had discovered that his body stank.) "Then I'll tell you everything
you want to know--you and the captain, and anybody else who wants to
listen. And we'll have to send a dispatch to Earth, too, because this
is important.... But, please, I only want to tell it once." Because--he
did not say--I may not have time to tell it again.

For those cold and murderous presences in the clustered inner suns had
reached out as casually as a bear flicking a salmon out of a run and
snatched the unknown woman from Hatcher's planet. They could reach
anywhere in the galaxy their thoughts roamed.

They might easily follow him here.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was good to be human again, and McCray howled with pain and joy as
the icy needle-spray of the showers cleansed his body. He devoured the
enormous plates of steak and potatoes the ship's galley shoved before
him, and drank chilled milk and steaming black coffee in alternate pint
mugs. McCray let the ship's surgeon look him over, and laughed at the
expression in the man's eyes. "I know I'm a little wobbly," he said.
"It doesn't matter, Doc. You can put me in the sickbay as long as you
like, as soon as I've talked to the captain. I won't mind a bit. You
see, I won't be there--" and he laughed louder, and would not explain.

An hour later, with food in his belly and something from the surgeon's
hypospray in his bloodstream to clear his brain, he was in the
captain's cabin, trying to spell out in words that made sense the
incredible story of (he discovered) eight days since he had been
abducted from the ship.

Looking at the ship's officers, good friends, companions on a dozen
planetside leaves, McCray started to speak, stumbled and was for a
moment without words. It was too incredible to tell. How could he make
them understand?

They would have to understand. Insane or not, the insane facts had
to be explained to them. However queerly they might stare, they were
intelligent men. They would resist but ultimately they would see.

He settled his problem by telling them baldly and plainly, without
looking at their faces and without waiting for their questions,
everything that had happened. He told them about Hatcher and about the
room in which he had come to. He told them about the pinkish light
that showed only what he concentrated on--and explained it to them,
as he had not understood it at first; about Hatcher's people, and how
their entire sense-world was built up of what humans called E.S.P.,
the "light" being only the focusing of thought, which sees no material
objects that it is not fixed on. He told them of the woman from the
other ship and the cruel, surgical touch on his brain that had opened
a universe to him. He promised that that universe would open for them
as well. He told them of the deadly, unknowable danger to Hatcher's
people--and to themselves--that lay at the galaxy's core. He told them
how the woman had disappeared, and told them she was dead--at the hands
of the Old Ones from the Central Masses--a blessing to her, McCray
explained, and a blessing to all of them; for although her mind would
yield some of its secrets even in death, if she were alive it would be
their guide, and the Old Ones would be upon them.

He did not wait for them to react.

He turned to the ship's surgeon. "Doc, I'm all yours now, body and
soul ... cancel that. Just body!"

And he left them, to swim once more in space.

       *       *       *       *       *

In so short a time McCray had come to think of this as life, and a sort
of interregnum. He swept up and out, glancing back only to see the
ship's surgeon leaping forward to catch his unconscious body as it fell
and then he was in space between the stars once more.

Here, 'twixt Sol and Betelgeuse, space was clear, hard and cold, no
diffuse gas cloud, no new, growing suns. He "looked" toward Hatcher's
world, but hesitated and considered.

First or last, he would have to look once more upon the inimical
presences that had peered out at him from the Central Masses. It might
as well be now.

His perceptions alert, he plunged toward the heart of the galaxy.

Thought speeds where light plods. The mind of Herrell McCray covered
light-millenia in a moment. It skipped the drifty void between spiral
arms, threaded dust clouds, entered the compact central galactic
sphere to which our Earth's sector of the galaxy is only a remote and
unimportant appendage. Here a great globular cluster of suns massed
around a common center of gravity. McCray shrank himself to the
perspective of a human body and stared in wonder. Mankind's Sol lies in
a tenuous, stretched-out arm, thinly populated by stellar standards: if
Earth had circled one of these dense-clustered suns, what a different
picture of the sky would have greeted the early shepherds! Where Man's
Earthbound eyes are fortunate to count a thousand stars in a winter
sky, here were tens of thousands, bright enough to be a Sirius or a
Capella at the bottom of a sink of atmosphere like Earth's--tens of
billions of stars in all, whirling close to each other, so that star
greets star over distances that are hardly more than planetary. Sol's
nearest neighbor star is four light-years away. No single sun in this
dense, gyrating central mass was as much as one light-year from its
fellows.

Here were suns that had been blazing with mature, steady light when Sol
was a mere contracting mass of hydrogen--whose planets had cooled and
spawned life before Earth's hollows cupped the first scalding droplets
that were the beginnings of seas.

On these ancient worlds life existed.

McCray had not understood all of what Hatcher had tried to communicate
to him, but he had caught the terror in Hatcher's thoughts. Hatcher's
people had fled from these ancients many millenia before--fled and
hidden in the heart of the Orion gas cloud, their world and all. Yet
even there they were not safe. They knew that in time the Old Ones
would find them. And it was this fear that had led them to kidnap
humans, seeking allies in the war that could not forever be deferred.

Hatcher's people were creatures of thought. Man was the wielder
of physical forces--"paranormal" to Hatcher, as teleportation and
mind-seeing were "paranormal" to McCray. The Old Ones had mastered both.

McCray paused at the fringe of the cluster, waiting for the touch of
contemptuous hate. It came and he recoiled a thousand light-years
before he could stop.

To battle the Old Ones would be no easy match--yet time might work for
the human race. Already they controlled the electromagnetic spectrum,
and hydrogen fusion could exert the force of suns. With Hatcher's
help--and his own--Man would free his mind as well; and perhaps the Old
Ones would find themselves against an opponent as mighty as themselves.

He drew back from the Central Masses, no longer afraid, and swept out
to see Hatcher's planet.

It was gone.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the great gas cloud the tunneling blue suns swept up their graze of
hydrogen, untroubled by planets. Themselves too young to have solid
satellites, Hatcher's adopted world removed again, they were alone.

Gone!

It was for a moment, a panicky thought. McCray realized what they had
done. Hatcher's greatest hope had been to find another race to stand
between his people and the Old Ones. And they had found it!

Now Hatcher's world could hide again and wait until the battle had been
fought for them.

With a face light-years across, with a brain made up of patterns in the
ether, McCray grinned wryly.

"Maybe they made the right choice," he thought, considering. "Maybe
they'd only be in the way when the showdown comes." And he sought out
_Jodrell Bank_ and his body once more, preparing to return to being
human ... and to teach his fellow-humans to be gods.

         [Transcriber's Note: No Secton V heading in original]





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