Part 2

Langford looked away quickly. As though from a great distance he heard Crendon say: "Now you may open your eyes. Remember, you may not see at all for five full minutes!"

Mentally he added: _Or ever! I shouldn't be discouraged. A man does what he can. Ten years of it, ten years of trying to save human sight. And every day I learn something. And every day I envy men who endure merely the loneliness of space. Why pretend? I have never felt compassion for humanity in the abstract. It is only when I look into eyes that I have failed to heal and realize that I can do nothing at all._

"Dr. Crendon, I can see! Everything--clearly."

And so it was that Dr. Crendon--moody, skeptical Dr. Crendon--received the greatest shock of his life. He had anticipated an agonized outcry--or a joyous one. But Joan had spoken hardly above a whisper, in a tone of quiet assurance, as if she had known all along that she would see.

And suddenly Crendon realized that she _had_ known! For mutants could see into the most probable future! Not too clearly, but clearly enough! How could he have been so blind?

As Crendon turned he saw that Langford had fallen to his knees beside his wife and was sobbing convulsively, his head cradled in her arms. He tiptoed softly out of the room. He felt curiously hollow inside, as though all capacity for emotion had been burned out of him by the corroding acid of his own skepticism.

3

Five minutes later Langford was replacing the bandages on Joan's eyes. He felt like a man who was playing a game with a deadly, unseen antagonist in a room full of crouching shadows. No--not a room. As he bent above his wife, his hand on her tumbled hair, the space about him seemed to fall away into darkness. And now he was gazing straight down the interplanetary deeps at a green world swimming in a nebulous haze. The haze dissolved, drifted away, and he saw the green hills of his native land.

He saw the earth, and crouching shadows covered the face of the land.

The crouching shadows of enormous insects. He could not escape from them because they were everywhere; when he broke into a run the mantis shapes followed him. They towered above him, sinister, horrible. He felt like a man caught in an invisible trap, the sky hemming him in, the ground beneath his feet a dissolving quagmire.

He shook the illusion off, for he did not want Joan to see the shadows as he saw them. What was it Crendon had said? She must be made to feel that you need her. Well, he did; he knew now that more than his own honor was at stake. If the alien ship could not be located his fears would not remain subjective. The fate of humanity hung in the balance.

His imagination had been stimulated abnormally by the events of the past few days; now it was leaping ahead of developments. For all he knew to the contrary the alien ship had foundered in the void or crashed on one of the inner planets in a red swirl of destruction.

Interstellar exploration was not without its risks and those risks would mount steadily to an alien intelligence as unfamiliar landmarks loomed up out of the void.

"You do not need the bandages," Langford said, a deep solicitude in his voice. "If you simply shut your eyes you would see the ship clearly. My thoughts would guide you to it."

"My vision is sharper when my eyes are bandaged," Joan replied. "You must trust me, darling; I know. When my eyes are sealed there is no emotional block and my inner vision has free play. I am prevented from using my eyes by an actual physical impediment. So I strain all of my faculties to see as far as I can in the dark. Call it a psychological quirk if you wish; I only know that it helps."

"If it helps that's all that matters," Langford assured her. "Forget I put my oar in."

"Don't think about the ship for a minute," Joan said. "Make your mind a blank. Then visualize yourself standing before the viewport staring out, just as you stood when you first saw the alien ship. Visualize the ship coming toward you through the void. If you can visualize it clearly I'll be able to locate it, no matter where it is now."

Joan paused, as though she didn't quite know how to make the complexity of the problem clear to her husband. "I can't explain the power," she said; "I know so little about 'time', far less than the physicists think they know. Mutants, they tell us, can visualize 'time' as a stationary dimension, freezing all event objects in 'the past' and in the 'probable future'. They can travel along 'time' in either direction at will."

"But you do not think of it as an actual journey?" Langford asked; "you merely shut your eyes and see?"

Joan shook her head. "It isn't quite as simple as that. Clairvoyance is never simple; it's accompanied by an intense inward illumination. It's a little like staring at something through a long vista of converging prisms. Objects get in the way and there's doubt, uncertainty. Sometimes it's sheer torment.

"Sometimes I can't see at all. And even when I can see there's a curious, almost terrifying sense of _wrongness_ about it."

"You mean you feel guilty?"

Joan smiled slightly. "Did Alice feel guilty when she went through the looking glass? Perhaps she did! But I didn't mean that kind of wrongness, not a moral wrongness. It's as though the strange tensions will get you if you don't watch out. Rush in upon you and project you forcibly into another place. As though you were a jet of steam imprisoned in a bottle that's much too tight and forced in the wrong direction by a power you can't begin to understand.

"You keep fearing you'll get caught in the neck of the bottle and wake up screaming."

"Good Lord!" Langford muttered.

"I've never got caught," Joan said. "Now make your mind a blank, darling. _We're going to find that ship!_"

* * * * *

A moment later Langford stood holding his wife's hand, a sharp apprehension in his stare. Joan seemed slightly agitated. She sat gripping the arms of her chair, her bandaged eyes turned from the light.

Suddenly her lips moved. "Ralph, I can see the ship! It's coming straight toward the viewport. You didn't tell me it was so beautiful, so--so huge!"

"I was waiting for _you_ to tell _me_!" Langford said, quickly.

"Well, I'm telling you, darling! I'm glad you didn't completely visualize it. Now I'm sure I'm not just reading your mind. It must be three hundred feet long; it's hard to tell where the illumination comes from."

Joan straightened suddenly. "It's no longer just a ship," she said. "I'm still outside, but I've moved closer to it. And I can sense a rustling deep inside the hull, a vague stir of activity that's not entirely physical."

While Langford held his breath Joan pressed her palms to her temples. "The rustling is becoming clear. There are swift, abrupt movements, accompanied by thoughts. But I'm not sure whether the thoughts come from one mind or many minds. The thoughts are swift, piercing. _Darting_ thoughts. That's the only way I can describe them."

Her voice rose slightly. "I can sense a living presence deep inside the ship. More than one, I think. There's a kind of swarming."

"A swarming?"

"I'm not sure about that," Joan said, quickly. "I don't think they're moving about much. The thoughts seem to come from one direction. I can just make out a shape now; it's tall, and very slender."

"Winged?" Langford whispered.

"No, no, don't prompt me!" Joan was excited. "The important thing is that I can see it. I may never see it clearly. Gauzy--yes, it _is_ winged. It has gauzy, shining wings, folded on its chest. Two clawlike appendages, raised in a praying attitude. Perhaps I saw that in your mind; you mustn't interrupt again."

"I won't!" Langford promised.

"The creature is horribly agitated!" Joan said. "It looks upon your ship as a menace. Its brain is humming with fear; it is preparing to contact you, warn you. It's getting ready to warn you in a strange way. It has prepared something for just such an emergency. Something small, glistening. I can't make it out, but it's putting the object into a luminous shell!"

"That's right!" Langford said, forgetting his promise. "They shot the shell into the void; we picked it up with a magnetic trawl."

There was a brief silence as Joan thought that out. Then her lips twisted in a strained smile. "If you say another word--"

"Sorry!"

"It's bad; it hinders." She raised her arms in a gesture of grim urgency. "Now the ship is moving swiftly away from your ship. I can dimly sense vast distances rushing past. And there's a feeling of loneliness, of utter desolation. No despair, exactly; it's as though I were sensing the utter desolation of deep space through a mind filled with a bitter nostalgia!

"If the feeling wasn't so intense, so strange and bewildering, I'd say it was a '_Carry me back to old Virginia_' feeling! Does that make sense to you? It's like--someone thrumming a guitar a billion miles from home, whistling to keep up his courage, remembering something very precious and beautiful lost forever. I can't explain it in any other way."

She was silent for a moment. Then she said: "Now a planet is taking shape in the darkness. It's pale green and crossed by a long, wavering streamer of light. I can make out continents and seas."

Joan stiffened. "Ralph! There's only one planet in the Solar System that catches the sunlight through great swarms of meteors in the plane of its ecliptic. The lights of the Zodiac! It must be the Earth!"

* * * * *

Langford dared not speak for fear of breaking the spell. Joan was trembling now, as though thoughts from the past were impinging with a tormenting intensity on her inner vision.

"The ship's out of control!" came suddenly. "It's plunging down through the lower atmosphere toward a vast expanse of jungle. A tropical rain forest. A mist is rising over the trees and a burst of flame is coming from the ship. It's zigzagging as it descends."

Emotion seemed to quiver through her. For a moment she remained silent, her lips slightly parted.

Then more words came in a rush. "The ship lies on an island in a forking river. Above it the foliage is charred, blackened. There are three rivers and just below the island the water is white with foam. There's a tremendous cataract about five miles below the island. It's the largest cataract I've ever seen."

There was an eagerness on Langford's face, but he remained silent.

"There's a man swimming in the river above the cataract," Joan went on. "A brown-skinned man with straggly hair, his shoulders gleaming in the sunlight. I'm going to try to read his mind."

Langford did not move. For a moment there was no sound in the room save Joan's harsh breathing. Then, suddenly, she straightened and ripped the bandage from her eyes.

"Brazil!" she exclaimed, exultantly. "Darling, I've located the ship for you. That island is in the interior of Brazil, in the deep jungle, close to the headwaters of the Amazon!"

Langford stood very still, scarcely daring to breathe. In his mind's gaze he saw a slender space cruiser lying unguarded in a suburban hanger close to the dark waters of the great Northwestern Canal. Commander Gurney's own private cruiser, the _White Hawk_!

How much of his mental audacity was inspired by sheer desperation Langford could not guess. But he suddenly saw himself climbing out of a thrumming jet plane in deep shadows and running straight toward the cruiser with Joan at his side.

He saw the cruiser ascending, saw himself at the controls, with the red disk of Mars dwindling beyond the viewport. He saw the myriad stars of space and the rapidly expanding disk of the Earth pierced by wavering banners of light.

And then it dawned on him that in some strange way Joan had seen the vision first and was sharing it with him. He knew then that he could not fail.

4

Beneath the descending cruiser the roof of the forest gleamed in russet and emerald splendor above a labyrinth of wooded archipelagoes.

It still seemed a little like a dream to Langford, but he knew that it wasn't. The vision that he had experienced three days before, standing beside his wife in a white-walled room, had taken on the bright, firm texture of reality.

He stood before the controls, with a thrumming deck under him, and studied the shifting landscape through the _White Hawk's_ viewport. He had never before flown directly over the Amazon Basin, and a river of shining wonder seemed to flow into his mind as he stared.

It was Joan who broke the spell. She tugged gently at his arm, her face anxious. "I don't see any sign of the three rivers!" she exclaimed. "Do you?"

Langford swung about. "We haven't passed the great cataract of Itamaraca yet," he said. "It rushes straight along for five or six miles. Then it becomes the most impressive waterfall in South America. A few miles below the falls the river spreads out into a lake."

Langford turned back to the viewport. "When we see the lake we can look for another branching and the island. The island is right in the middle of the three rivers you saw in your vision. But it's just a dot on the electrograph. Are you sure it has a distinctive shape?"

"It has a high, rocky shoreline," Joan assured him. "The central tributary cuts it in half and the other rivers flow around it. It's heavily forested, but the rent in the foliage where the ship came down is so wide you should be able to see it from ten thousand feet. The treetops are charred over a half mile radius."

Langford smiled and squeezed her arm. "I bet you'd be happy mapping the Amazon in a bark canoe like a twentieth century explorer," he said.

He grinned wryly. "A big rock island, mysterious as a cave of vampire bats, bisects the largest tributary west of the Tocantins, and it's just a dot on an electrograph to us. We've explored every crevice of every world in the System, but sometimes I envy our ancestors; they had elaborate pictorial maps to guide them."

After a moment the ship leveled off, and the Great Cataract swept into view. It was a shining whiteness between two towering walls of foliage festooned with hanging vines, and flame-tongued flowers upon which the red sunlight seemed to dance.

It foamed and cascaded over jagged rocks, swept around little clumps of submerged vegetation, and tore at sloping mud banks glimmering in the sunlight.

Then the cataract became a receding blur and the wide river split up.

Langford heard Joan cry out.

* * * * *

The island which loomed below was about eight miles in circumference and so heavily forested that it resembled a single shrub of wilderness proportions growing from a cyclopean stone flowerpot.

Its high banks were almost vertical, its summit a charred mass of foliage cleft by an enormous rent which funneled the sunlight downward to a circular patch of bare, scorched earth.

Something glittered on the forest floor, far below the blackened foliage. But whether it was the alien ship, or merely the glint of sunlight on the river which flowed completely through the island Langford could not determine from his aerial vantage point.

A divided island was really two islands, but Langford was in no mood for geological hair-splitting. Erosion had failed to efface the original, hoary uniqueness of that towering mass of jungle, and for all practical purposes it was one island still, its high banks and far-flung aerial traceries hemming it in, and sealing its teeming life in eternal solitude.

Langford turned and looked at Joan with eyes that were meshed in little wrinkles of confidence. "I'm going to gun her down through that gap!" he said. "We could crash through anywhere, but the best way to locate a wreck is to hew close to the cinder line!"

He bent grimly over the controls, in his mind a vision of a great host of alien creatures rushing toward him through the forest, swarming over the ship, refusing to let him emerge.

He feared their weapons, which he had never seen. He remembered the little statue with its suicidal impulses, and its ability to shed force-shell replicas of itself.

The ship thrummed as it swept downward, the lights in the control room blinking on and off. Lower it swept and lower. The blood was pounding in Langford's temples when a black-rimmed funnel of swirling brightness yawned suddenly before the viewport. The same instant the cushioning pressure of the anti-gravity jets made itself felt, holding the ship suspended above the roof of the forest until its atomotors ceased to throb.

The ship descended under its own weight amidst a slowly dissolving pressure field. Sweeping down between the fire-blackened trees, it circled slowly about and settled to rest on the soggy forest floor.

When Langford and Joan emerged a warm breeze, laden with jungle scents, swept toward them. They stood for an instant close to the air-lock, staring about them.

No sound broke the stillness except the insistent hum of insects and the rustling of the vegetation on both sides of the ship. A few yards from where they were standing the ground sloped to the brown waters of a swift-running river, its surface flecked with white foam, and studded with little whirlpools that swirled with a darkly writhing turmoil as dry leaves fluttered down, twisting and turning in the breeze.

Twisting and turning above a limp form that lay sprawled on the riverbank, its bare shoulders horribly hunched, its head immersed in the muddy brown water.

Joan screamed when she saw it.

She broke from Langford's restraining clasp and went stumbling forward until she was knee-deep in the swirling current. She was stooping and tugging in desperation at the half-submerged figure when Langford's hand closed on her shoulder.

"Let me handle this," he said, firmly; "it's no job for a woman."

On the bank Joan swung about to face him. "It's a job for a mutant!" she protested, her lips shaking. "You don't know how close he is to death. He's still breathing, but if we don't get him out--"

She broke off abruptly when she saw that Langford needed no urging. He was already on his knees, tugging at the sprawled form. For a moment he tried to succeed from the bank, his knees sunk deep into the mud, his neckcords swelling. Then, with a gesture of fierce impatience, he waded deep into the water and lifted the unconscious man on his shoulders.

* * * * *

Langford carried the man up the sloping bank, eased him to the ground and rolled him over. A small, wiry man, darkly bearded, his mouth hanging open! Staring down at the familiar face, Langford experienced a sense of irony so sharp and over-whelming it interfered with his breathing.

He leaned forward, and started working the man's arms slowly up and down. He knelt in the soft mud, a murk of depth and shadow looming behind him, a grim anticipation in his stare.

Suddenly the man on the riverbank stirred, groaned and opened his eyes. "Hey, cut that out!" he grunted. "What in blazes are you trying to do, you devil? Wrench my arms from their sockets?"

"Good morning to you, Commander!" Langford said, chuckling.

"Langford!" Commander Gurney's eyes began to shine, as though lit by fires from unfathomable depths of space. A convulsive shudder shook him. Digging his fists into the mud, he sat up straight.

"You stole my ship!" he rasped, staring at Langford accusingly. "What made you think I couldn't trace my own cruiser? You can't rip out infra-radiant alarm installations unless you know where to look. Didn't you know I'd follow you in a fast auxiliary cruiser and get here ahead of you?"

"I was afraid you might, sir!" Langford smiled ruefully. "But it was a chance I had to take."

Gurney's eyes narrowed. "Your ship was sending out more automatic alarm rays than a chunk of radium. My men had orders to close in the instant you brought her down."

"Just where are your men now, sir?" Langford asked.

Something happened to Gurney's face. His features twitched and the strained intensity of his stare increased so sharply he seemed to be staring right through Langford into space.

"Those devilish things attacked us!" he muttered. "Exactly as that little statue did! There were dozens of them, ten feet tall, and they kept coming. We blasted, but the charges went right through them; they lifted my lads up in their devilish preying arms and dumped them in the river!"

Sweat gleamed on Gurney's brow. "It was ghastly, Langford. In the river--like pieces of dead timber. The current carried them downstream. I was helpless. I--I kept blasting, but I couldn't save them!"

"How did you save yourself?" Langford asked.

Gurney passed a dripping hand over his brow. "I was struggling with one of them when everything went blank. That's all I remember."

Langford stood up. "I don't understand it. Why did that creature go away and leave you with your face submerged? Why didn't it make sure you'd drift downstream too?"

"I'm sure I don't know, Langford!" Gurney jerked a tremulous hand toward the wall of foliage on the opposite bank. "Why don't you swim over to their ship and ask them? You'll find the ship in a clearing about three hundred yards from the bank. They've cleared a path to it."

"That's just what I intend to do!" Langford said.

Joan paled and moved swiftly to his side, her eyes wide with alarm. "Ralph! You're not going alone--"

Langford nodded. "I'm a pretty good swimmer," he said.

Joan stared at him. "But why?"

"It's a little hard to explain," Langford said. "You've got a picture in your mind of something pretty horrible happening to me. Somehow I feel that everything about that picture is wrong. I've got to cross that stream, darling; I'd be a pretty poor specimen of a man if I turned back now, when we're so close to the answer."

Joan said nothing. She would have argued and pleaded, but she knew that it would have been of no use.

* * * * *

Five minutes later Langford was stripping on the riverbank. He slipped into the water quietly, and struck out with powerful, even strokes. On the opposite bank he turned an instant to flick a wet strand from his forehead, and wave to his wife. Then he struck off into the forest.

He was a hundred feet from the bank, walking with his shoulders squared, when something bright and incredible swirled up from the forest floor directly in his path.

"For your forbearance, your kindliness, thank you, Langford!" a voice said.

It was not a spoken voice. It was still and small and remote, and it seemed to come from deep inside Langford's head. Langford stopped advancing; he stood utterly rigid, his temples pounding, his eyes riveted on a darting shape of flame.

"Don't be alarmed, Langford," the voice said. "I'm not a shape of flame. But I can wrap myself in blinding flame so that the human eye cannot see me as I am."

"Who are you?" Langford heard himself asking.

"A traveler blown from his course by ill cosmic winds!" the voice said. "A lone and bewildered stranger from a universe so remote its light has not yet reached you. A genuinely frightened stranger and--a telepath, Langford."

The voice paused, then went on. "I made you come to me just now. A promise of medals could not have done it, but I got inside your mind, and drew you to me. Medals, rewards, promotions; you prize them, don't you? What a pity that I cannot stay until your tunic gleams with ribbons."

Another pause. Then the voice said: "It is difficult to get the intimate feel of your language. You must forgive me if my speech seems a little strained."

"Your speech. You--"

"You're not afraid of me, Langford? No, you mustn't be; you are the kindest of men. How can I convince you that I am--you have a phrase for it--letting down my hair? I shall leave you soon, my friend. I have repaired my ship, and I must try to return to my own people. But before I go I will tell you the truth."

* * * * *