Part 2

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.