Part 2

We waited for Swanson to join us, and then we went into the shaft. Soberly, we stood near the pile, feeling the strangeness of the alien life that lived as hellish atomic fire in the shielded tube nearby. We could feel a probing in our minds, alien fingers fishing about curiously, but with cautious reserve of ... a precocious child.

It was Swanson who put it into words finally. Simple, prosaic words. "The blinkin' can has come alive!" he muttered. That tore it. Swanson hadn't an imaginative bone in his body, and if _he_ felt it ... it _was_.

My mind flashed back across the years to the old man of the Mojave yards and his stories about living ships. The living thing that was the Sun, the thing that had given birth to Clem's soul had gleamed in on that soul through the break in the plates, and in doing that it had posed on Clem awareness. Awareness that she was part of the mighty life stream of the cosmos ... part of the living fires of the stars. In a way that human minds could but dimly grasp, the Sun had spoken to Clem ... called her. And _this_ was the result....

Understand ... there was nothing malign about her ... not just then. She was almost childlike. Pure, brilliant, willful....

We jerry-rigged a control set right there in that shaft, hoping to cut across the linkages from the top deck; but it was futile. I had the insane notion that she was laughing at us and our pestering efforts to re-establish dominance over her.

We tried withholding fuel, but that was no good. There was enough plutonium already in the pile to take us across the system. Certainly enough to take us where she wanted to go. We didn't want to guess about that!

Holcomb and I tried slipping the cadmium emergency dampers into the pile. The first one slipped in easily. But the moment the drop in activity registered, the second rod fused in the slip shaft. It was the same with all the rest. We could not insert them. Clem would not be anesthetized. She was protecting herself ... calmly, almost reproachfully. I really believe she was learning about men and their will to command even things they can never really understand.

* * * * *

That's the way it went. If the crossing of the Belt had been nightmarish, the next weeks were insane. Our every attempt to re-establish control was thwarted easily by the mind in the pile. Mars fell astern and Clem swung inward toward the Sun. For a while Terra blazed green and bright off our starboard bow, almost at eastern quadrature. Then she, too, began to fade behind us as the possessed ship drove ever Sunward.

I think we were all a little mad during those terrible days. We lived with the knowledge that we were helplessly at the mercy of the ship. Gradually we admitted to ourselves where she was taking us. We realized where "home" was....

We took to sitting dully in the Control room, still clad in suits that we were too lethargic to remove, and staring at the silvery disc of Venus that daily grew larger in the forward screens.

We were sitting so when the tension broke Holcomb. One minute he was as morosely silent as the rest of us, and the next he had seized a spanner and burst screaming out of the room.

His voice was like nothing human. "I won't let her do it!" he was shrieking. "I won't let her take me!"

Automatically, the rest of us got to our feet and started after him. It was as though none of us really cared, but we felt that we should do something. Just what, no one seemed to have figured out. We clumped heavily down the companion ways after him toward the open hatch that led to the tube-shaft. In our helmet radios his voice was a continuous tinny and distorted harangue.

"The Sun! The Sun! She's going to it. It called her and she's going to it! But she won't take me!" and then laughing wildly, the gibbering mirth of a madman.

His laughter woke me. "Holcomb!" I yelled, "Come back!" Jammed in the narrow corridor, we struggled after him.

"She won't take me! I won't let her take me!" Holcomb was screaming. "I'll kill her! I'll tear the rotten life out of her! Kill! Kill her!"

We reached the hatchway in time to see the crazed physicist tearing at the moorings of the pile with his spanner. Already he had one of the safety latches loose and was banging furiously at the second. Instinctively, we reeled back, for our wrist-geigs whirred as deadly amounts of radiation fanned out from the bent housing. Holcomb, bathed in a rain of invisible death, was too engrossed in tearing the last latch free. The latch that would free the pile and send it spilling out of the nozzles into space.

Then Clem struck. How can I describe the horror of it? Insensate metal came to life ... became enraged. And it killed. Deliberately and without conscience. The overhead crane that carried the plutonium ingots to the pile moved. It swung its claw down to pick up a sharp shard of steel that lay on the deck. Like a hand, it picked it up ... aimed ... struck!

Edge first, the jagged fragment caught Holcomb across the shoulders, shearing his slender body in two and leaving the two uneven halves twitching on the dark floor. An aura of pure, ravening hate filled the shaft. Clem had showed her teeth.

Swanson laughed, and the sound chilled me. I knew then that we were all going mad. The intricate system of checks and balances that nature built into our brains could not stand another hour of this.

I slapped Swanson's face with my gloved hand and he stopped laughing, but his face was a frozen, distorted thing. I knew mine was the same, for utter terror was choking the breath from me, and I wanted to run screaming from the terrible hate that filled the shaft and from the bloody, mangled thing on the deck.

I managed to make my voice understandable only by biting hard on my lips until the pain steadied me. I gave the order to abandon ship. With only a little luck we could make Venusport, but I would have abandoned ship if we had been halfway between here and Centaurus.

I divided the men into three groups. Two men and an officer to each lifeship except the last. Two tubemen alone in that one. I took the controls of the first one myself after setting the finders of the other two on my own ship so that I could do the astrogation for all three. Then without another look at our accursed ship, we slammed out of the jettisoning valve into free space.

The cool stars and the nearby silvery disc of Venus calmed me somewhat. The tremendous vistas of space were something familiar and real. And we were free....

But we had bargained without Clem. The encounter with young Holcomb had changed her. He had tried to kill her ... tried to sunder her body. The childish core of her had become that hateful thing we had felt in the shaft. She had been attacked and her reaction was quick and dreadful.

* * * * *

Almost before we were out of her shadow, she turned in an impossibly short arc and charged us, atomic hell blazing from her tail. Like a vengeful comet, she sought us out.

I called to the other ships to scatter and they leaped away from us like arrows. One went up and to starboard, the other went down and to port. I gave my own tiny boat full throttle and headed straight for the bright crescent of Venus.

Clem would not be denied. One of the lifeships was caught in her tail-flare and I saw it vanish in an incandescent blot as the heat detonated the tank of monoatomic hydrogen it carried. Debris fanned out from the scene of the explosion, banging against our ship's flanks.

And still the infuriated metal monster was not satisfied. She caught the second lifeship ... Swanson's ... about fifty miles astern of us and gored it to death with her needle-sharp prow.

Clem swung in a wide circle and bore down on us. At her speed I knew she would run us down in seconds, and there was nothing left to do. I closed my eyes and waited.

Death did not come. Instead there was a wave of something like emotion. It was disgust and impatience and sharp command. A mighty ... _something_ ... was talking ... not to us ... and not in words or even symbols we could truly understand. But the power of it was so great that we could catch the overtones, the emotional nuances that surcharged it. Something was talking to Clem ... commanding her to forget her childish wrath and ... COME!

As though jerked around by a cosmic leash, the crazed ship veered about, her tail-flare blinding us. When we could see again, she was a spark far Sunward and driving at incredible speed.

In tight silence, the two crewmen and I watched her for hours until she vanished into the bright glare of the Sun. After that we followed her with the radar, eyes intent on the golden blip steadily moving inward toward the yellow mass of Sol. We drifted in space, just watching and waiting. And then at last the fleck of golden light blended with the Sun.

I knew even as I watched her that she did not die. No. There was maturity and satisfaction and ineffable pleasure flooding out from the spot where she vanished ... but no nuance of death!

We turned away, emptied of emotion or even thought. In a numb trance we found our way into Venusport. We did not explain. By unspoken consent we said nothing about the thing we had witnessed. It was too new, too fresh. And it was too unlike life as we know it. The port authorities listed us as shipwrecked by collision with an errant asteroid, and we got passage back to Terra ... and sanity.

It was a long time before I ventured into space again. And every time I look up at the Sun I have the feeling that I have seen something no human should.

I saw Clem go home.