CHAPTER XI

They carried the body of Don Mariner down the ramp and laid it on the rock-hard earth of the desolate bowl.

Mac, standing next to Alan, said in his ear, "Come aboard again. I want to show you something."

Alan turned obediently, although why he should follow Mac's commands--for it had been a command--he wasn't sure; and Win screamed, a high hysterical keening that set Unquote to ululating too. The men all cried out. "What's wrong? What is it?"

"Look at your head!" she said to Alan, pointing. Even in that somber moment he could not help laughing.

"How?" he said. "I'm not built that way."

"Oh, God," said Bill Thihling. "Alan, you took an awful blast in the ear. Why didn't you say something about it?"

"What are you talking about?" he said irritably. "I wasn't hit." He put a hand up to his right ear. Brave said, "Look out, boss, you'll hurt it. It's a bad one."

He fingered the ear. The tip and lobe, and part of the convolutions of the outer ear, felt like bits of steak which had been burnt in a searing flame; he looked at his fingers, amazed, and saw black flakes of skin and powdery, charcoal-like stuff. That must be the flesh, cooked and carbonized, almost incinerated in the astounding heat of the little fireball. "They did hit me," he said stupidly, staring at his fingers. "I never felt it."

Brave, examining the ear without touching it, said, "You'll lose most of that ear, son. It's--_you never felt it_?"

"I can't feel it now. I mean, I have sensation in it, I can feel my fingers when they touch it, but it doesn't hurt."

Then, just as comprehension of what he was saying began to dawn on him, he heard Mac say again, very urgently, "Get aboard the ship. Jump!" And he jumped.

He hared it up the ramp, Unquote writhing on his shoulder, and leaped in through the first door he came to; Mac yelled, "No, this one!" It was the front control room, the largest of the three; he was out and into it in a flash, to find Mac already sitting in a chair before the central panels. "Sit down there," snapped the lanky man, indicating the next seat. Alan did, half-wondering why, half-knowing that he must. The great viewplates above the controls, on which was mirrored the earth and sky on every side of the disk, blinked on; Mac cursed angrily.

"Why couldn't you have followed me at once? Now the fools have got in." He was out of the chair and bolting the door of the room before Alan could open his mouth. Then he was back, touching levers and buttons, adjusting dials. One of the viewplates showed the crystal bubble closing; then another came on and they could see the center room. Brave and Win and the others were there, talking earnestly, although their voices could not be heard. Suddenly the door to that room swung shut. Brave hurled his tremendous bulk at it, but it was shut fast. Mac chuckled.

"Okay, you damned impetuous idiots. Sit down if you don't want to be smeared all over the floor." Evidently they could hear him. After a moment's argument they took seats. Mac pushed over a long lever, like the joystick of a monoplane, and with a very slight rocking motion the saucer rose into the air.

* * * * *

Mac glanced at Alan. "Buckle that strap around your chest, pal. You'll need it for the turns."

"How in the name of everything sane did you learn to operate a disk, Jim?" he asked. Just then he was less surprised at the man's cavalier treatment of his friends than at the enormity of this, that McEldownie could fly an alien disk.

"Nothing to it," said the other. "I was a pilot originally." He looked over again. "_That was five hundred years ago_," he said, almost casually. "Buckle the strap, hang it."

Alan did so in a daze. He knew that he was not in complete control of himself, and yet he did not know why. There were a hundred questions rocketing in his mind and they confused him so that obedience to McEldownie's commands came automatically. He wondered if he were under hypnotic influence again; but he did not feel that he was.

"Oh, you are, chum," said Mac without looking at him. "Not altogether, you understand; Brave's counter-hypnosis played hell with my plans for you. Cuss the big so-and-so. I should have killed him when he moved out of the lamps and out of any possible control. But I wanted him too. I liked him."

"Who are you?" breathed Alan....

The cold voice spoke in his mind, shattering his questions before they were asked, shaking what was left of his confidence, forcing him to quail mentally and physically.

_Oh, stubborn slave, didn't you know? Didn't you know?_

_God, God, perhaps I did._

_I am you and you are me..._

McEldownie laughed. It was not a cold laugh, not sinister or dramatic. It was a perfectly healthy expression of mirth. "Alan, I'm sorry. I'm really sorry, and you won't ever believe that, but it's true. It surprises me. Living among you for all these years has mellowed ol' Mac, I guess. I find myself thinking of you as friends, when I used to regard you as dogs: faithful without knowing it, helpful, indispensable in many cases, but hardly more than good dogs." He paused a moment, then went on. "I'm your voice, of course. There's no trick to it when you know how. A matter of hypnosis plus the lights plus psychology, plus whatever the power in us is that makes our minds different from yours. I'm the voice. I wasn't going to admit it, but my plans have changed for you."

* * * * *

He banked the disk around over desolate Manhattan and said, "Takes a while to get the reflexes working again. I haven't sat behind the controls since we left home. Your five-times-great grandfather wasn't a twinkle in his old man's eye when we left home."

Alan could not speak. He was remembering things he had not been able to remember, the voice and what it had told him, the night that it called him from bed to come to the terrible lamps, and--

"Yes, it was me, it was all me, Alan. I was the voice in your head at the telecast, I called you in the night; I worked the lights in the shed on Project Star. There are plenty of us out there, but I wanted you for my own personal sidekick. You're smart and a good scientist, and you'll make a good lieutenant when we go home." The words made no sense and yet Alan seemed to catch a glimmering of the understanding that was to come.

He said, "I guess I ought to exclaim, 'You're mad!' but I know you're not. You can pilot this thing and you can move faster than a cheetah, and everything's gone mad this past week and I want to know why. Don't lie to me, Mac. For the love of God, don't lie to me. One more wrong theory implanted in my skull and I'll blow my stack for good."

"I won't lie. I'm all through lying, to you at any rate. The others can't hear me at the moment, but I suppose I may as well tune them in too." His homely face, with its great prow of a nose and the half-shut green eyes, looked a little sad. "I'm afraid they're all going to die, Alan. Except Win, that is. You see, the speeds at which I'm going to fly this disk will kill a human being. On the turns, if I get into dogfights, the 'G' forces will be terrific. You and Win can stand 'em, because you've been conditioned. Brave and Rob and Bill will be smashed to jelly under the 'G' impact. I'm sorry. I like Brave and I admire Rob's intelligence. I'd like to save them. But they got aboard because you were slow, and now they're done for. I can't land and put 'em out. Time is precious. I have to maneuver this ship until I know I can do stunts with her like the ones I did at home. A long time ago, Alan." He grinned ruefully. "A long time even to me."

"What do you mean, I was slow getting aboard?" Alan fastened on this small facet of the affair, frightened of finding out too much of the truth at once.

"Man, you can move as fast as I if you try. You've had three long treatments under the lamps. Your energies are stepped up, if you learn to use them correctly, your reflexes are as fast as those of the cat on your shoulder, and you're almost deathless compared to your friends. Might as well start there," he mused. "They can hear us in the other room." On the viewplate, Win and Brave nodded. Jim clicked shut a switch. "Now they can see us. Okay, you four, I'm going to do some explaining. I can hear you now, but if you start to interrupt I'll switch you off."

Brave said, "Alan, are you all right?"

"He's ginger-peachy," said Mac. "In fact he'll be all right two hundred years from now.

"There's no use in explaining the rays to you; it would take hours and you would scarcely grasp the principle even then. I'll tell you what they do. They lengthen your life span--my own is about a thousand years, but Alan's will be nearer four hundred, for I caught him late. Generations of my ancestors were exposed to them, too; it affects the genes eventually and we're born long-lived. They quicken your reflexes through a process of strengthening the nerves and certain cells of the brain. They also affect the portions of the brain which send and receive telepathic stimuli. After one treatment it's easy to control a man over a long distance.

"The effect of the rays on the muscles is unique. They become almost rubbery, not loose, you understand, but capable of stretching and flexing in directions that look uncanny to a non-initiate. That's how poor Grady escaped being sliced down the middle when he rammed up his ship. He drew all his muscles to the sides and flattened out like a plaster on the chair. You couldn't do that; your skeletons are thicker and more immovable than ours. I'd show you how I can ooze out sideways and make my ribs about as level as a picket fence--but I'm afraid you wouldn't like the sight. It must be pretty gruesome to an Earthman."

"Were the rays in the TV lights?" asked Bill Thihling.

"That's right. I've caught plenty of fish that way, including President Blose of the U.S. of A. and nine-tenths of his cabinet. A lot of your scientists have become unwitting puppets through being seen on _Worlds of Portent_. Alan got two treatments there and one on Project Star. Win got her first in the gym of the colony and two more in that shed." He smiled guilelessly. "You were right about her, of course, in a way I mean; for she can't feel pain. I caught her mind just before I pinched her--and very pleasant it was, too, my dear, even if I meant it impersonally--and told her to simulate pain. She was under my control every second of that time. When she left, I pretended to go to sleep, and called her back. I had a feeling I'd need her around. Glad I did. She and Alan are all the fighting forces I have at the moment."

* * * * *

Alan brushed over much of what he wanted to know, to ask, "Can you feel pain, Mac?"

"Yes, I can. A man can't give up pain. It's too valuable. We put an added ingredient into the rays we used on you people of Terra, to eliminate pain."

"Why?"

"I'll get to that. The welder, of course, was a man who had been treated. One of our boys got rid of him in a vat of molten metal. Couldn't have an unfinished experiment walking around loose. He slipped up when he failed to simulate pain. Sometimes we get 'em like that, too dumb to do the right things even under complete hypnosis. Win was a different case. She didn't know she'd been burnt by that cigarette. If she'd seen it, she'd have yipped. She was conditioned to do it, even to think she felt pain. If you'd known you'd been grazed by that fireball, Alan, you'd not only have roared, you'd have _thought_ you felt it."

"Why don't I think so now?"

"It's too late for verisimilitude. Your subconscious knows that. It shrugs its teensy-weensy shoulders and forgets it."

"Who shot at Alan after the welder incident?" asked Brave. His face was cold and malignant.

"One of Getty's men."

"Doc Pomposity?"

"That's right. Getty's not fully under control. His unconscious and natural wish not to kill Alan made him send a man out with an automatic, rather than a grenade pistol. But he was conditioned enough to feel that Alan was dangerous to us and he at least made a stab at assassination. Then before he could do it again, we got to him and told him we were going to 'convert' you."

All this while he had been twisting and turning the disk, making practice runs and dives; the control rooms, floated within the hull and leveling off no matter what direction the great saucer took, vibrated slightly and continuously. It was almost like being in the hold of a sailing ship.

Rob said, "I suppose the curious construction of your skeletons and muscular development helps you stand the motion and the acceleration of the disks?"

"That's right. Alan and Win can stand it too, especially since they feel no pain of any sort. But we haven't started going fast yet--I haven't put it above five hundred. When we hit four thousand--that's m.p.h.--I'm afraid you'll die, you three." Mac scowled unhappily. "I hope you realize I don't want to kill you? In the first place, I'd like to have you on my side, because we both have a score to settle with the hounds who bombed your cities. I would have slain Mariner out of hand, slain him as he slew poor Grady when he had him helpless in that chair, but luckily he got his in the fight. I haven't any wish to kill off my potential army, but the speed of an air battle will do it. And I'm going to be in some fights before long."

Alan, strapped to his chair, was leaning over toward Mac as far as he could. Now he said, "By heaven, you haven't any pores in your skin!"

"I was afraid you'd notice that before. I had a fantastic yarn cooked up to explain it. That's right, pal; Grady and me, and all the rest of us, haven't any sweat glands or pores or tear ducts. There are other little differences too, but they don't cut any ice. The differences notwithstanding, we are human. Not strictly Earthtype human, I suppose, but human nonetheless." He brooded over his controls, as the disk roared silently through the sky. "I like you all, too, dammit. I don't want to kill you. I think I'll chance another ten minutes and set you down.

"I must be getting soft in my middle age," he added with a wry smile. "Chancing the loss of a world for three idiot kids. Oh, well. What the hell. A gallant gesture will maybe pay off in the long run."

* * * * *

There were several minor points that nagged at Alan; he wanted them out of the way before someone asked the one big question of McEldownie. "Why didn't Grady control my mind when we tied him up? Why couldn't he save himself?"

"Erin Grady was a weak link. We have 'em in our chain, you know. We're not supermen. He was weak at hypnosis and he couldn't bear pain. I think he was a throwback to the days when we were altogether Earth-style humanity. He called to me, though, and I shot back; but I came just too late. That fool Mariner!" With a savage twist he angled the disk toward earth. Then he laughed. "I've wanted to compliment you on your mutant theory, Alan. It was ingenious as the devil and it accounted for everything you'd seen up to that time. If we could regenerate parts, the loss of pain wouldn't matter, and we could take the treatment we're giving you and lose pain and be thankful. But 'tain't so. We're not supermen. It's only our robots--pardon me, our earthly henchmen--who are immune to pain. Coming in contact with both kinds of 'aliens' must have confused the very living dickens out of you."

"Hold on," said Alan. "I just thought of something. If I'm immune to pain, why did I feel it so excruciatingly when Brave hit me, when he wanted to put me under hypnosis? Tell me that was all in my mind...!"

"It wasn't. You didn't get the pain-destroying rays till your third treatment, on last night's telecast."

"Oh. That's it." He patted Unquote on the head; she was getting restless. Then it became obvious why. "Damn," said Alan, "now I'll have to have this suit cleaned. Puss, couldn't you have waited a little longer?"

Bill asked, "What about the saucers? I mean, they suddenly turned out to be better than anyone suspected. Why?"

McEldownie looked grim. "Some saucers had been sighted that we knew weren't ours. We had a few left from the days when we first came to Earth, in the late 1700s; we used to fly 'em occasionally to keep our hands in. But these weren't ours. So we knew we had to speed things up. Till then we'd been content to go along, giving your scientists an unobtrusive push now and then, so they'd believe they had done it all; our time schedule called for intergalactic-space disks about 1984. Well, we knew when the others were seen that we didn't have all the time in the world, as we'd thought. So we had to jump in feet first, take a lot of men under our controlling wing, start making robots--there I go again, that's a bad word for them--making unkillable soldiers of others, and substitute our own advanced designs for those in use at that time. We were too late; the damned enemy came down too fast. But now that I've got one of theirs--and a beauty it is, too--thanks to your help, I have a fighting chance."

"Who are the enemy?" It was Win, breathless, leaning forward, her breast rising and falling rapidly with the emotion and wonder of this thing. "Who are you going to fight?"

Mac looked at her in the viewplate. "The men from my planet," he said quietly. "The men who cast us out, as if we'd been the fallen angels of Lucifer in your myth, chucked us out of our own world and sent us to wander in the void."

* * * * *

He made the ship do a quick turn, and Alan saw Brave and Rob and Bill suck in their bellies and grimace. Mac said, "They half-crippled me then, damn them, and this is the first time I've flown since I left home. Some of the others have managed to stay a little more in practice. But by God, I'm still the best hotshot pilot my people ever produced, and I'm going to prove it today." He glanced up at the viewplate. "I'm going to let you out, you three. I want Alan and Win; they're my people now, and in a fight they can be a terrific help, for they're almost impossible to kill. I'll land now, and you can go. I oughtn't to do it. But curse you, Injun, I like you." He shot the disk toward the earth from a height of seven miles.

Brave said, "We won't get out."

"Don't be silly. You'll die under the 'G' load when I really get going."

"Then we'll die. I won't leave Alan with you, nor Win either. You will let us all out, or kill us."

"You bloody village idiot. What good will it do you to die?"

"I can't leave Alan. I saw him through Argentina and I'll see him through this hell you've put him into. Besides, someone's got to clean and bandage that ear, or he'll lose the whole thing. It's a bad wound."

"Not to him it's not. He doesn't feel it. The rays eliminate all danger of infection, disease--he can't even catch a common cold. His ear will be okay."

"Ear, schmear," said Rob Pope. "I stick by my friends too. Maybe all I can do is die like a squashed mouse, but I _can_ do that. We don't scuttle for cover, alien."

"Likewise," said Bill Thihling laconically.

"Beastly blasted blue-bottomed baboons of knotheaded numbskulls!" roared McEldownie. "Do you want me to kill you, then?"

"I want you to let us all go; but if you won't, then Alan's better dead than living under your influence, like a marionette."

"He won't die. I tell you! No matter what happens to you, he'll go on living. He'll be my man."

"I don't think so," said Brave calmly. "I don't care what sort of all-powerful rays you put him under, or how you've caught the reins of his mind. If you kill me, Alan is sooner or later going to kill you. Live with that, McEldownie, or whatever your right name is. I don't for a minute believe that you can take as good a man as Alan and murder his best friend before his eyes and have him lick your boots. Kill me and you're done, Mac."

"Damn you, Lo! You're wrong, and you know it." He snarled at the viewplate. "You absolutely won't get out of the disk if I land it?"

"No."

"Then die, you fool," said Mac, the words half-strangled in his throat; and he sent the ship rocketing through space like a meteor.

* * * * *

Alan had felt Mac's mind leave his when Brave started to argue. He had concentrated furiously then on what he could do to over-power the alien. Very little of worth had occurred to him; but as a last resort he had determined on quick physical violence. If he could move as fast as Mac said he could, there was a chance.

Now, as the disk shot forward, he sensed Mac reaching out to touch his brain again, and with all his will he thought of other things, anything, anything except what he meant to do. He stared at the viewplate that showed the central room. He could feel almost no sensation of motion, and Win seemed quite all right. But the three men were curled in their chairs, gasping, even the mighty Indian writhing under horrible, painful pressure.

"For the love of God, Mac!" cried Alan.

And McEldownie slowed the ship. He turned a sickened, saddened countenance to Alan. "I can't do it," he said a little pitifully. "I can't kill that big red devil. I like him too well. I think he knew that when he made his proposition. I don't care how much it delays me, I've got to land him. Hear that, Lo?" he said to the viewer. "I'm going to do it. I'll put your whole precious gang out on land, and find some of my own boys. Project Star will be the place, if I can get there without interference. I can load up my crew and a few of the painless gentry and it'll make a better army than this would have been. But dammit, I did want my protege Alan with me."

"Say your dog, rather," suggested Alan bitterly.

"All right. Didn't you ever love a dog?"

"Yes."

"It's the same with me. I can't help feeling your race is inferior, but I can still be good and sorry to see you die, I can still feel affection for you."

"And that makes up for what you have been doing to him and the others?" asked Bill weakly.

"Oh, hell!" Mac bit his lip. "You are an impossible breed, you Earthlings."

Alan felt his mind withdraw again as he angled the disk around toward the west. In that instant, shoving aside the already unbuckled strap from his chest, and drawing the long hunting knife from its sheath at his side, he pounced out of his chair full upon the alien. Mac's green eyes flew open as Alan, his movements blurred by his incredible quickness caught the outlander's chin and dragged it back and with the other hand pressed the edge of the keen knife against the brown throat. Then, as he collected his startled thoughts, Alan said briskly, "Don't do it, Mac. Don't even think about touching my brain, because it's clear as a bell right now, and the first feeling I have of your meddling with it, I'm going to drag this knife through your windpipe. You can't control me without at least half a second's preparation, and with the reflexes you've given me, that's enough." He glanced up at the viewer. "Brave, Rob, don't either of you try to tell me anything telepathically. I know the different sensations I get when I'm being paged or controlled, and the first whimper of one of 'em sends this blade into Mac's neck."

* * * * *

No one spoke for a moment. Then Mac said, "If you knew how ridiculous you look, standing there with that whopping carver and with that sick cat on your shoulder, I really believe you'd give this business up and bust out laughing."

"Don't count on it," said Alan levelly. "I'll tell you what, Mac. You said you were going to let us all go. Maybe you were. But I don't trust you worth an inflated nickel. You'd have found a way to get Win and me back. Besides that, we only have your side of the story, and about a tenth of it, at that. I want to meet some of these birds that bombed our cities. They told Rob, before you had me murder them, that they had made a mistake. They had to kill someone but they didn't mean to kill us. That someone was obviously you. I want to know why. If I let you and this saucer get out of my hands, and then find that the bombers are in the right in whatever quarrel they have with you, I'll be sorry the rest of my life. So you're going to take us to 'em, Mac. We're going to get the whole story."

McEldownie laughed. It was a completely mirthless noise. "Kiwanawatiwa," he said to Brave, "I have you to thank for this mutiny, you and those hypnosis gimmicks of yours."

"No, not altogether," said Alan. The knife pressed in a little and the tall man winced. "It was your admission that you were my voice." My beloved voice in the depths of space, he thought, almost ruefully. It was fearful but I loved it. "If you hadn't wanted to brag, you might have kept control of me."

"I wasn't bragging. I wanted you as an ally and friend, rather than a puppet."

"Robot is the word. You used it a couple of times."

"Not for you, damn it. I liked you as a fellow human being."

Something flicked at Alan's mind with feathery tentacles; the knife drew blood and the feathery searching stopped. "That hurts," objected Mac.

"It'll hurt worse. Take us to the nearest disk you know of."

"How would I know of any?"

"You can find them. Do it."

"Don't push me too far," said the other icily. "Remember I'm infinitely stronger than you."

"But very susceptible to a sliced-up jugular."

"I won't wreck five hundred years of plans, even for you!"

"Not for me," said Alan easily. "For the sake of your throat, Mac old boy."

Mac sighed, and turned the ship gently, for fear of the deadly blade in Alan's remorseless hand, and sent it rocking over the hills inland.

"I'm a weak link," he said bitterly. "A weak link like poor old Grady. I didn't know I'd be so afraid to die."