Part 3

She turned away from him, and he fiddled with the controls of a small built-in telescreen. It was simple enough and he got it working easily, but it showed nothing. Just blackness. He left it on.

"You're thoroughly convinced of everything he told us, aren't you?" she asked at last.

"From a purely logical standpoint, what else--"

"Purely logical! For a little while I thought there was a chance that--that you weren't like all the rest."

"All what rest? I don't get your range, kid," Cragin answered.

"First you thought they were fakes--"

"At first that was logical, too. But old cloak-and-ray-gun there proved pretty damn conclusively that the crowd he works for are the bosses, the big bosses. That's what gets me."

"And it's the real reason, isn't it, that you wanted to call them fakes? Couldn't bear the idea of the precious culture of Earth taking a back seat to anything."

"That sounds good, coming from one of our top-notch scientists. The daughter and pupil of Fowler Griffin. One of our most respected...."

"Did you think we weren't human? Are scientists something to be worshipped?"

Cragin looked at her for a long, steady moment. He was mixed up again, and she was doing it.

"Without our science, Miss Griffin, we'd've all died five hundred years ago. Maybe that's why it takes top rating back home. What our men of science say we can do, we do--what they say we can't, we know we can't. It's that simple, only I don't see why I'm telling you this. For five centuries men have known from the day they could talk what their lives would be from that day to their deaths, and from one end of the universe their forbears had mastered to the other. It's all mapped out. It has to be, because the scientists tell us--they draw the maps. We follow them."

The girl was silent then for a long time, and Cragin fell to wondering exactly what she was getting at. Or maybe--maybe it was just the strain, or the shock of realizing that there were scientists who were of greater stature than Earth's, and it was they who truly ruled.

But the girl still had him mixed up.

There was a sudden gasp from her and he turned his head. The blackness in the telescreen had suddenly become punctured with white-hot, burning dots of light. Dots of light, perfectly aligned, in long, straight rows--a gateway! A gateway of stars, forged by the hands of those who owned all Space and Time, put into position to notify the entire cosmos that here for all who might seek it was the entrance to the home of the Owners!

For a moment Cragin could say nothing. He had seen their cloaked captor give a demonstration of raw power. And here was its counterpart at the other end of the ultimate in mastery--unvarnished, positive control.

They owned a universe, and were its architects as well.

"Ten million miles wide!" the girl breathed.

"A light-year long if it's a foot," Cragin said in a low voice. "And at the end--"

* * * * *

They watched as the pattern shifted; the dots grew larger until they were coruscating balls of white flame. And then, with a majestic slowness, the entrance to the gateway became a static, unchanging picture of unprecedented geometric symmetry.

"It's--we've stopped," the girl said.

"Cut our gun, that's all. Probably waiting for clearance to enter. The whole damn fleet of us."

"It's--it's pompous ridiculousness!" Her voice was edged with frustrated anger and it mounted as she spoke. "A gateway, a show-piece--a stupid affectation of the ultimate in egocentricity! With or without their little pathway, there's all of Space from which to make an approach--"

"I doubt it, princess. Outside this little welcome-mat I'll bet my pilot's papers there's a destructive field of some kind that'd blast the dye out of your hair at ten light-years. One gets you a thousand that this is the only way you get to see the top brass. And you don't do that without an O.K. from a big somebody."

The minute hand on Cragin's wristchron made seven complete circuits before the gateway again began expanding to receive them on the telescreen.

And then they were past its opening, and hurtling headlong down its great length at what Cragin knew must be a speed which, although no longer requiring flight by comptometer, would have taxed his skill to the utmost.

He and the girl watched the telescreen in silence for minutes, watching the pin-points of light on either side grow from minute flecks in the blackness to great spheres of flame within so many seconds, and then pass....

"Look!"

"Yeah, it's a great show. But--hell! It couldn't be a--"

The scintillating point of light which lie dead ahead, in the exact center of the gateway and at its extreme end, could not, Cragin realized, be a planet. Unless it were a perfectly polished reflector, it could not show so much like the miniature stars at either side.

It was a star, itself.

"It must be just illusion," he said evenly. "It's got to be."

"Oh no," Lin Griffin said. "Of course they live in the center of a star! They rule all, don't they? They're the great masters of all creation, aren't they? Certainly you don't think your great masters would live on anything so simple as a mere planet! But of course they live where the temperature is only several billion degrees--"

She began laughing and Cragin slapped her across the face.

"Cut it, kid, CUT IT!"

There were tears coming from her eyes and her face remained in the twisted contortions of hysteria even after her voice had become soundless.

She pulled away, and Cragin left her to herself. In a little while she began to cry and he could hear her sobbing above the even hum of the telescreen, but he left her alone.

And he knew one thing. It _had_ to be illusion. Damn it, Owners or not, no matter what the hell they were, it had to be illusion!

Cragin had never felt shaken through to the inside of him before. Fear and awe had been banished from the minds of men for five centuries. Yet he felt as though he were staggering blindly, and he knew he was helpless.

The pin-point had become a searing, blinding thing, and even as he shielded his eyes, it filled the screen. They were going into it.

Into it.

Into a live star.

No, was the only word he could think. No.

NO!

He spun away, wrenching the telescreen off as he did so.

But nothing changed, and he did not die. Somehow, there was no change at all.

He sat upright, rigid, as though self-hypnotized for what could have been hours or minutes. And there was no change, no awful, searing wave of white heat, no last instant of torture before death.

Simply, suddenly, a light jar.

And Cragin wondered sardonically if his small rectangular bit of enamelite would be at all impressive on the planet the Owners called home.

* * * * *

Neither Cragin nor the girl ever saw the planet as such. And it was a planet, Cragin learned, a planet little larger than Earth, honeycombed with subterranean tubes and chambers as had been the control point; a labyrinth which contained a civilization of little more than twenty million members; a headquarters for those who ran and owned the universe.

They were escorted to the testing place by two creatures of the fourth grade; bipeds, shorter than men, with hunched backs and splayed tentacles for arms and hands. Cragin noted that they carried armament of a sort; simple tube-like objects which were aimed at him while he was relieved of his Krells.

Then he and Lin Griffin were placed in a bullet-shaped vehicle, one of the guards operating its controls and the other stationing himself behind them.

Cragin was not prepared for the girl's sudden outburst and jerked his hands vainly at the empty holsters at his hips.

"Of course we can escape from these simpletons!" she cried. "We can easily overpower these dimwitted brutes--"

There was no reaction from their guards; Cragin's hands relaxed slowly.

"What--"

"Don't you understand? They're fourth grade--two less than our cloaked friend. They are our guards, so of course our superiors in intelligence, but still not on a high enough plane to interpret the emanations of pure thought as he was."

"You'll do, I guess. But I've still got a feeling that if either of us twitches an eyebrow--"

She continued as though he had not spoken. "He took your guns; we're now held prisoner under weapons. They have to rely on material means of power. Look, Cragin!"

Highly-polished curved metal walls of an alloy comprised of ores that he could not begin to identify flashed past at such speed that all sensation of motion was negated. There was no sound.

"I'm looking."

"It's a safe bet the tests will be something devised by the Owners themselves. Something that will measure our total thought potential--something based on an extremely advanced function of psychometrics."

"You're over my head again."

"If we're acceptable, Cragin, we're established in one grade or another--and will be constantly under the supervision of creatures of the next highest grade--that's the way it's been working so far, with the exception of the little excursion we're taking now."

"In other words--"

"In other words, we've got to think in the simplest patterns possible. Childish things. Anything that will belie our true intelligence level. What's your I.Q.?"

"I didn't ask you how old you were, duchess, but I test out at an embarrassed 158 or so."

"We match within ten points. It'll have to do. Because we've got to fake--test out at about 115."

"Like I say, you'll do. Testing out at 115, our bosses on the next level shouldn't be a shred above 130 or so. So--"

"So we've got them by almost a 30-point margin. We'll be in a position to out-think our immediate guards, and perhaps even those over them. It's our only hope."

"Mental imposters.... You just forgot one little item, honey."

"Oh of course. They're the masters of all, so there's no possibility that a mere human--"

"Take it easy. I didn't say it's no go. Just wondering if 115's are acceptable. If not, you know what happens. We go to the bottom of the class never to rise again. Maybe even 160's aren't eligible. Remember, the control points are hidden relative to the mental ability of the civilizations whose planets they control. Only people who exceed the Owners' estimate--"

"If they control our system, they control billions of others--we were told that. Some higher, some certainly lower. And we did discover the point."

"You and your father. I never would have."

"Look, Cragin. It's the only chance there is. But if I fake and you don't--"

"Yeah. You think it'll work?"

"I don't know."

"But you'd rather die, that it, than be a knowing slave to another civilization, even though it is undisputed master of--"

"That's why I'd rather die, Cragin! Because they're false masters!"

He didn't reply. She was confusing him again, and perhaps the basic reason for the confusion was that he didn't understand why she mixed him up. If there was anything Earth's culture stood for, it was the integrity of the fact--maturation and development of the individual through strict adherence to the known. Only the proven fact was worthy of belief and acceptable as a basis for thought. Nothing else.

But the girl wasn't behaving that way.

"All right. We gamble that an IQ of 115 is acceptable. Then we gamble that we can effect a break. In other words we just take a chance on a chance; make a really long shot out of it."

"Will you, Cragin?"

He laughed a little. Hell, sooner or later, anyway--

"Hand me my rattle," he said. "I better practice. The asteroids are falling down, falling down; the asteroids are falling down, my fair lady...."

V

The panels to two adjacent chambers were open.

"Guess they don't trust us together," Cragin said. The dark blue plastiglass of his Patrol tunic dully reflected the subdued half-light that emanated into the tube-like corridor from beyond the panels. Like a nightmare, he kept telling himself, like a nightmare. Impossible impossible impossible....

Her face was the color of white sand, and it was the only indication that she understood.

"Please try, Cragin."

"Sure."

"You want to try...."

"It's a cinch I can't arrest 'em, princess. And I know you want out. You want to sink 'em all and so do I. If there's any way, believe me--"

Cragin knew he would not forget the look etched in the thin white lines of her face as she was led into the testing place; there was something in it that he had never seen before in the face of an Earthman. Not an expression caused purely by reflex in time of danger or pain; not one carefully controlled after finding an unpleasant solution to an inescapable problem. Neither of those. But what others....

Cragin looked then to what he might be more successful in understanding. The testing place which had been readied for him was a small, independent laboratory, much like the control room of the machine-planet, save for the complete absence of telescreens. And awaiting him were two cloaked figures in red mail--technicians, second grade. The Owners were taking no chances.

He lay at full length on a sheet of metal that was as comfortably resilient and warm as an old-fashioned bed of feathers, and waited expectantly.

"Are you prepared, Earthman?"

"Fire away, braintrust." He wondered at the absence of equipment. Nothing was attached to him--no electrodes, none of the usual electroencephalographic devices. There was only a low hum, and the pale glow from the indistinct walls about him.

"The test begins, Earthman. Display your mind as you see fit."

The hum deepened. The walls became more indistinct, and the glow somehow became a part of the sound that filled the tiny chamber.

Cragin flashed his mind to his first years of schooling. He had been 10 years old, had learned the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two opposite sides ... "i" represents the square root of the quantity minus one, and is termed an imaginary number ... for every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction....

He lost all sense of time, and guarded against thinking of it, lest he betray even a basic knowledge of continuum dynamics. Had to keep it simple, child-like, simple.... The intensity of light diminishes inversely as the distance from its source is squared.

The voice inside his head was at length the signal that the test was completed.

"From this examination, Earthman, it is evident that you stumbled where you did purely by accident, and that the craft in which you traveled was out of control, operating entirely beyond your understanding."

Cragin kept his thoughts diffuse and made no effort to reply.

"Do I serve or die?" he asked at length.

"On a probationary basis, you serve. Grade, twelfth."

The test was done, and Cragin had won the first cast of the dice.

The ruse had worked, Cragin knew, not because the Owners and their test had been outwitted but because the test itself had been logically constructed to measure the level of a mind which was functioning at its maximum. The trick was based on folly--folly in which higher level intelligences would not indulge, and which lower ones would not recognize as a gamble for higher stakes than slavery. Cragin knew he would not have indulged in it had the chance been up to him alone.

What surprised him of course was that so far it had worked. And it made Lin Griffin all the more mystifying, almost inscrutable. Theoretically, she should have dismissed such a plan as ridiculous. But logic and the theory upon which it was based, and what Lin Griffin did, were two different things. Cragin tried to put the puzzle from his mind. And the girl. The probabilities were against his seeing her again. And that, for reasons as puzzling as the girl herself, made him peculiarly miserable.

* * * * *

Other slaves from a hundred other civilizations, ranging from the shape of a man to shapes that Cragin could not identify with his three dimensional senses had been packed into the hull of the spacecraft with him; they were all of his assigned grade, and therefore would constitute little problem. He could tell by their reactions to outside stimuli that he was their mental superior.

The pilot might be a different matter. He carried arms much resembling his own Krell guns, judging from their outward appearance of construction and functional design. But there was one thing--they had a fixed grip, like the ancient pistols of Earth. It meant they could be used from only one hold, and indicated that they were copied from the product of a civilization perhaps a hundred years behind his own. But perhaps his slim margin of advantage would be enough.

A cloaked and red-mailed servant of the second grade had briefly addressed the group prior to take-off, and for moments Cragin had feared that he would accompany the consignment. But he had not.

The voice had simply said, "New servants of the Owners, you are about to be transported to your place of work. As servants of the twelfth, and lowest, rank, your duty will be the mining of unconsumed zronon, employed by the Owners to maintain their home and their glorious gateway on an equal level of brilliance to that of the stars themselves. Death awaits that servant who lags in his output. Your destination will be the eighth mining planet, nearest the edge of the Trespass Limit. It was once, like all other mining planets, a live star, extinguished and cooled by the Owners that its highly precious and combustible substance be turned to their own desired ends.

"Are there any for whom this directive has not been reduced to sufficiently simple terms?"

There was silence.

"Very well. Be it remembered among each of you that the Owners, those who near the goal of the creation of life, and who are long since the masters of death, command you."

Then it was over, and Cragin waited in the hot, dank hull, sweating inside his helmet, in which there was an endless supply of his own unique atmosphere. His own helmet, because it was far from being so perfect, had been taken from him upon completion of the test. Such was the case with each of the others, and the textures and colorations of the stuff they breathed or absorbed was as varied as the planets on which they were spawned. And there was hardly any helmet of the same shape or design as another.

The waiting did not last long, but Cragin's plan was in his head as completely as he could fashion it when he felt the landing jar. If it were to work, it would be executed with split-second speed and precision, or again, the alternative would be destruction. It was evident that to use his advantage to the utmost, it must be coupled with the dual advantages of immediacy and surprise.

The airlock opened; with the rest, Cragin filed through it. He took glancing note of the positions of the few guards; kept their pattern of surveillance stenciled in his memory.

The file was split--a quick maneuver placed him at the end of his own section as it was led to the opening of a shaft even darker than the leaden twilight which hung low like a weighted shroud over the entire sphere.

It would be in a moment, or a month, or a year....

The slave ship had not prepared yet for take-off; its tubes smoked lazily, cooling.

A month, even a day, would be too long. If it was to be attempted at all, it was to be NOW.

* * * * *

And Cragin had the squat guard on a grip which broke his spine before his heart had time to beat again. The gloom helped; the din that issued dully from the mine's lower levels covered the near silence of the death which Cragin had meted out. The weapon was the guard's only insigne of identity, and Cragin had it cradled in his own arms before the thick, broken body hit the ground.

Then he ran, laboring against a slightly stiffer gravity than his Earth-muscles had been born to, waving the weapon above him with all the strength he had!

Toward the ship and its smoking tubes--gesturing, pointing toward the cave-mouth, and yelling his head off, wondering how closely the time-lapse would match between the time he reached the ship and the other guards, even now running their first steps toward the cave mouth toward which he pointed, would realize that although he was giving alarm, he was running away from, not toward, the indicated trouble point.

He was within the airlock by the time the first guard to answer his cry of distress had taken twenty running steps, and had, upon taking the twenty-first, realized that Cragin was going in the wrong direction. But the margin had been enough--

The lock slammed shut.

The pilot, returning to his control panels from the brief recess he had taken elsewhere in the ship, only saw Cragin for as long as it took the Earthman to unleash the weapon he had captured. There was a flat explosion, the weapon bucked uncomfortably, and the pilot died with a large, blue hole through what Cragin took to be his head.

There was only one more thing left to logic, and the rest--

For the second time in his life since he had met Lin Griffin, he wondered what, if something there was, might lie beyond logic.

The simplified control panel resembled something that might have been manufactured in Earth factories half a century before. It had been obviously designed for the capabilities of the servant-pilot to whom it was assigned. If only she had the guts--

Cragin blasted off, and twisted the speed-control full on.

The Trespass Limit would shatter him, of course. Or within moments at least, the death which the Owners themselves controlled would seek him out. Unless....

He could not understand the symbols, but he knew the acceleration and velocity needles were going crazy--they were deep in a red-hued band and nearing its limit.

Even through the inverse inertia field, Cragin could feel the thrust of the terrible acceleration and then--

There was a click.

A hum which rose within seconds to a high shrill followed it and then another click came, another hum, then going up the scale.

Such sounds could be only from--COMPTOMETERS!

Cragin spun a telescreen control, a mad laughter welling from within him, bursting through his blood-flecked lips, shaking him uncontrollably. There was blackness! The gateway, gone--the great, star-like home of the Owners, vanished! Somehow, he was out!

A critical speed, and the comps going like crazy!

Cragin laughed and laughed until he fell unconscious.

VI

It had been, as closely as he could tell, nine years.

Nine years of aimless--no, helpless, wandering from planet to planet, from sun to sun, flying tight-rope between countless dimensions, following his fantastic escape from the realm of the Owners. He should feel excitement now; should want to laugh until he deafened himself because even now, swimming palely in the field of his forward electronoscope was the solar system, his system; HOME.

Luck, chance, whatever you wanted to call it, he was home. Stumbled on it, of course, as he had stumbled his entire way the length, depth and time of all creation. He should laugh, but there was no strength for laughter. There was just a tranquil kind of acceptance, a mould of thought into which Cragin had long since forced his mind, in order to retain his sanity as he ran the never ending gamut of change which was the very fabric of the infinity in which he had plodded.

Home.

A place of torture and of slow death, but at least a place where he might die among his own kind.

Had he not been barely minutes through the Barrier with the comptometers still warm, the insistent radar signal wouldn't have been worth its interruption of his thoughts.

But anything so close to the Barrier demanded at least cursory investigation. He flicked a radar panel relay to TRACK.