Part 3

A thin flexoplas coverlet was thrown across her. One slim bare leg dangled over the edge of the bunk. Her face, Saxon saw, was heart shaped, the closed eyelids delicately blue.

At Ileth's giggle, the creature opened her eyes, sat upright with a half-suppressed scream. Ileth backed out of the doorway in embarrassment, but Saxon stood as if turned to stone.

The tingling sensation was sending goose flesh racing over his skin. The alien emanations were streaming straight from the girl on the bunk.

He recovered himself, thought violently, angrily, "_Who are you?_"

The girl stared at him without making a sound. Saxon realized that her eyes were amber as topaz, large and strangely lambent. Then a faint smile twitched the corners of her lips. She made no move to escape, not even to cover her breasts and shoulder.

"_You!_" the thought reached Saxon tinged with amusement. "_It would be you who discovered me!_"

She touched a tiny instrument strapped to her wrist, which Saxon noticed for the first time.

"_Who are you?_" he thought again, then narrowed his eyes with crazed disbelief.

He could see the bulkhead through the girl. She gave a low laugh. The flexoplas coverlet, which had lain so lightly over her lap, collapsed slowly.

The girl was gone, dissolved. Only her throaty laugh lingered in the still air.

Saxon rubbed his eyes. He felt Ileth trembling against him as if she had a chill. Setting his jaw, he stepped up to the bunk, felt the sheets. They were warm and still held the impression of the girl's body.

He straightened, realized that the tingling in his scalp had ceased. The alien telepath was gone. But where?

"Let's get the hell out of here," Ileth said vehemently.

Saxon followed her into the passage, switched off the lights, closed the door softly behind him.

"I don't believe it!" said Ileth. "I don't want to believe it." Her fine patrician features were paper white, making her black lashes and eyebrows stand out like heavy strokes of a crayon. Her lips were bloodless.

Saxon shook his head in bewilderment.

"Couldn't you read her mind?" asked Ileth.

"She had the most perfect mental barrier I've ever encountered. I couldn't read a thing. Only...."

"Only what?"

"Nothing," he said abruptly, shaking his massive shoulders as if to free them from a burden. "Nothing. I think we'd better keep our mouths shut about this too. If we went around telling what we've seen, they'd throw us in the psychopathic ward."

Ileth shuddered.

"Maybe it was an hallucination," she suggested. "Maybe we're nutty as a fruit cake, I hope."

V

"You've been through the Little Death before," said Saxon. He and Murdock, the T.I.S. agent, were in the control room, Murdock's eye glued to the scanner. "What's it like, Murdock?"

The gaunt, frosty T.I.S. agent took his eyes from the scanner, faced Saxon.

"Not so bad," he replied laconically.

"I've heard it's a pretty rugged experience."

Murdock allowed himself a tight smile. "That depends on how active a social consciousness you have. You're a non-Newtonian physicist. You know the Pachner conception of the space-time continuum better than I do. Villainowski's stellar drive inverts the Newtonian concept that a vehicle travels through space during a passage of time. It operates through time during a passage of space.

"Yes, yes," Saxon interrupted impatiently. "But the effects of the time field.... What do you experience while the ship is in the time field?"

"That's the Little Death," replied Murdock in a dry voice, "though the name is misleading. Actually you experience a segment of your own life, either the past, the future, or the present. As Villainowski would explain it, time is co-existent, while in the time field our lives are spread out around us, but because we're equipped with three-dimensional sense organs we're restricted to a single series of episodes anywhere along our life span."

Saxon frowned and said, "In other words, it's just as if we returned to the past and relived some incident that occurred to us before?"

"Right. Or into the future and experienced something that hasn't happened yet."

Saxon's frown deepened. "But what's so rugged about that?"

"Nothing," rejoined Murdock dryly, "if you've lived an exemplary life. It's not pleasant, though, to live over and over again a period when you committed murder say, or were terribly frightened, or even did some little thing that you've been trying your best to forget since."

Saxon, caught a brief mental flash from the T.I.S. agent, as he shoved the picture of a girl with pretty Slavic features out of his mind.

"I'm not looking forward to the Little Death!" Murdock said dryly, and returned his eye to the scanner.

Saxon leaned back in the acceleration chair. The captain was bending over the three-dimensional space-charts along with the third mate. A spaceman stood at the robot pilot. Another, whom Murdock had replaced at the scanner, was reclining in a second acceleration chair.

There was an air of tension in the control room. Saxon realized suddenly that the captain was checking the robot controls.

That could mean only one thing. It was nearing time for Villainowski to switch the _Shooting Star_ onto the stellar drive. They would be going into the Little Death any moment. Saxon sat up abruptly. "How long before we switch over, Captain?"

The captain looked up from the charts. "We've attained minimum velocity. Villainowski's in the engine room now. I'm expecting orders to turn her over right away."

Murdock turned from the scanner again, fixed Saxon with his pale blue eyes.

"By the way, Jon, you've been prowling the ship from stem to stern the past three days." His voice was pitched too low to reach the officers checking the star maps and robot controls. "Have you a line on Q62 yet?"

Saxon could read suspicion in the T.I.S. agent's mind. "No," he admitted, "and I'm more puzzled than you. Ileth doesn't know who Q62 is, or even if he's aboard, although she's been commanded by General Atomic to take her orders from him."

"You're sure of that?"

"Yes. I'm sure of it."

There was a pause, each man busy with his own thoughts.

"I'd swear," Saxon broke the silence, "that Q62 isn't aboard, nor any other General Atomic agents."

Murdock regarded him speculatively and Saxon caught his thought, "_What the hell makes him so damned sure?_"

* * * * *

Sure? Saxon thought to himself. He wasn't sure about anything. The alien stowaway was still aboard. His sixth sense had warned him of her nearness a hundred times during his sporadic jaunts about the ship. But he had been unable to establish contact with her.

He had kept his mind open to the wash of thoughts from crew and staff, but, so far as he had been able to learn, they were all loyal to Government. Not even in their secret innermost thoughts had he discovered any evidence that a traitor was aboard.

Murdock interrupted his reflections, asking, "Have you any idea what that N.P.A. had discovered before he died?"

Saxon started, looked at the T.I.S. agent uncomfortably. Murdock's irrelevant question had conjured a vivid picture in his mind of the death of the N.P.A. in Villainowski's office.

"I don't know," he said miserably, beginning to understand how uncomfortable the Little Death might be. "I would give a lot to know. He may have had a clue to what I am."

Murdock's cold blue eyes narrowed, and he regarded Saxon with a peculiar intensity. "_That's a devilish odd way for him to put it_," the T.I.S. agent was thinking. "_What he is! Now why the hell would he say that?_"

Saxon realized with chagrin that he had made a slip. He should have said, "Who I am," not "What I am." No human ever doubted that he was a genuine specimen of _homo sapiens_.

The engine room telegraph buzzed suddenly, and when the captain answered, Villainowski's voice reached the two men.

"Sound the general alarm, Captain. Turn the ship over to the robot control. We're going into the Little Death."

"Right," said the captain. He looked pale and worn and older. He snapped off the telegraph, turned to the third. "Sound the general alarm and turn on the public address system, then go to your cabin." The third nodded, reached for the switch.

An ugly clangor broke through the _Shooting Star_ from stem to stern, followed immediately by a harsh metallic voice issuing from strategically placed audios.

"All officers, members of unlicensed personnel and staff report to your quarters at once and lie on your bunks."

There was a series of clicks as the ship went smoothly over to the robot controls.

The command ordering everyone to their cabins was repeated three more times.

Saxon realized there was no one in the control room, but himself, Murdock, and the captain.

"Coming?" asked the captain from the doorway.

"In a minute," Murdock replied.

The captain departed hastily, and Saxon followed the T.I.S. agent across the deck to the control board, where a single dial was marked off in parsecs.

"I'm damned curious about this four dimensional drive," Murdock confessed, as he dropped into an acceleration chair before the dial. "I've been through it before. But I'd like to follow its operation here in the control room as long as possible before we blank out. Are you game?"

"Sure," Saxon's voice was eager. He took a seat beside Murdock, staring at the dial marked off in parsecs with fascination.

He became conscious of a sobering silence. The robot controls had cut off the jets. A giddy feeling of weightlessness possessed him.

Suddenly the radiograph began to click off a message. He saw Murdock frown, tear off the tape, read it.

"Good Lord!" the T.I.S. agent burst out. "Read it! We've got to get to Villainowski before we go onto the stellar drive!" He leaped to his feet, went soaring in the air, a pained expression on his face. Murdock had forgotten their weightless condition now that the jets were off.

Saxon who had snatched the strip of paper, flashed his eye over the words.

IMPERIAL HEADQUARTERS:

TO CHIEF J. VILLAINOWSKI. URGENT. ORDERS CANCELLED. TURN BACK TO EARTH WITHOUT DELAY. ALL FIVE COPIES OF STELLAR DRIVE STOLEN. GOVERNMENT CANNOT RISK YOUR LIFE IN DEEP SPACE UNTIL YOU CAN REPLACE PLANS.

MUSTAPHA IX.

Saxon realized the machine was still clicking off the message over and over again.

Murdock had pushed himself to the bulkhead, where he kicked off, gliding through the door. Saxon followed cautiously, conscious of a yellow mist collecting in the control room.

The T.I.S. agent got just beyond the doorway when he floated unconscious to the deck.

Saxon made it to the head of the ladder. Then he, too, lost control over his muscles.

The mist was like soup, thick yellow pea soup.

His last conscious thought was, "So this is the Little Death!"

* * * * *

"Here! Why are you crying?" asked the big white giant. His voice was gentle, compassionate, and he was naked except for a kilt of a strange gleaming material like woven light.

"But I don't want to go," Saxon protested in a reedy, childish tone. He realized in dismay that the giant wasn't a giant at all, but normal and man-sized. "I don't want to go," he heard himself tearfully repeating.

They were in a room, the little boy that had been Saxon and the big white man, and a door across the room was opening. The little boy that was Saxon shrank against the man.

A woman appeared in the doorway. She was tall and beautiful and dressed like the man in a gleaming kilt. She smiled at Saxon, but he was not reassured. He hung back from crossing the threshold.

Saxon saw a troubled look pass between the two. Then the man steeled himself, picked up the squirming boy, carried him through the doorway.

It was a strange sensation that possessed the mature Saxon, stretched on the cold deck at the head of the ladder to the engine room. He wasn't dreaming. He was the little boy, and yet he seemed to be outside himself, watching his own actions, appraising himself like the detached half of a dual personality.

He was in the time field, Saxon realized. That was it! He was reliving a segment of his life span that had taken place before he was eleven!

His heart leaped spasmodically. At last the curtain was being raised on those blank years of childhood!

The room into which the man carried him, Saxon saw, was larger that the anteroom and cluttered with strange machinery, ugly machinery. The far wall was a solid bank of windows, through which he could see a green meadow rolling gently away to blue foothills in the distance. Light poured through the windows from a blazing sun high overhead and a second orange sun was just rising.

The man deposited him in a chair. Saxon quit thrashing, as the woman fitted a skull-cap over his head, making minute adjustments. A cable led from the peak of the skull-cap to a frightening machine which the woman bent over next, and set in operation.

Saxon could feel a rush of thought pouring into his brain. Queer thoughts couched in semantically obscure words.

One stood out. "_Earth._" It was repeated many times before he began to comprehend the import of the alien symbols. "_Earth is the third planet of a star known to its inhabitants as Sol!_"

With a feeling of strangeness the Saxon who observed realized that the boy was being taught to speak English!

* * * * *

Saxon shook his head groggily, pushed himself to his hands and knees and found himself floating six feet in the air. He had forgotten that the jet drive was still off.

It came back with a suddenness that flung Saxon to the metal deck.

He scrambled to his feet, his mind in a whirl. Forgotten temporarily were the emergency orders commanding them to return to Earth. If Villainowski had been right, then Saxon had actually relived an event which had transpired before he was eleven.

Then who the hell was he?

He returned to the control room, stepping over the unconscious body of Murdock, who had not yet recovered from the effects of the time field.

The dial on the control board read 1.3 parsecs!

He jumped for the scanner, clamped his eye to the aperture, and immediately jumped back!

Dead ahead was a huge blazing sun!

It looked so close that the _Shooting Star_ appeared to be falling straight into the maw of erupting atomic energy.

But reason returned, and he knew they must still be millions of miles away. He went back to the scanner, spotting first a second sun not so close, then a third, small and red like a fiery coin.

The ternary system of Alpha Centauri! They were out of the Solar System!

"Please," said a girl's voice behind him. "Stand back from the scanner! Don't try for your gun, Saxon, or I will be forced to shoot!"

Saxon whirled around.

Ileth Urban stood in the doorway, a dart gun leveled at his stomach. Behind her, he saw the shame-faced Murdock surrounded by the crew. Murdock was helpless, his arms in the air.

"The crew have mutinied," said Ileth. "The ship is now under the control of General Atomic."

Saxon's jaw sagged. He said, "So you are Q62." It wasn't so much a question as a statement. He knew. He could read it in her thoughts. But why hadn't he been able to see it there before?

It wasn't possible, but there could be no doubt. Ileth Urban was Q62.

Then the thoughts of the men in the corridor made themselves felt. Every man jack of them had gone over to General Atomic, not recently, but weeks and months ago, before they had ever left Earth.

He dropped into a chair, his head in his hands. How had they been able to disguise their thoughts all this time?

He looked at Ileth in her chartreuse green short-waisted jacket. She held the dart gun leveled at his chest. Her patrician features were set in grim unhappy lines.

"Something!" Saxon thought wildly, "Something has gone terribly wrong!"

VI

The T.I.S. agent, his bony fingers locked beneath his head, was stretched face up on his bunk. There were five of them in the ship's brig--Saxon, Murdock and Villainowski, Mercedes, the anthropologist and Brand, the bio-chemist.

"Jon, that girl's crazy about you."

"What?" Jon Saxon swung up his head, regarded Murdock coldly.

Without moving, the T.I.S. agent repeated, "She's in love with you, Jon. Though what Ileth can find to love in that ugly granite mug of yours is beyond comprehension."

Saxon said, "So what?" Everyone was watching him speculatively.

They had been cooped together for nine days now, the four men and the woman. Yesterday the ship had landed. But none of them knew where.

"So what?" Murdock echoed breaking the silence. "My Lord, man, play up to her. She's eating her heart out for you. Can't you see it's our only chance?"

"No," said Saxon stiffly and blocked out their thoughts. "No, I don't. You know as well as I do, that the crew and the officers, even the staff, except Mercedes and Brand here sold out to General Atomic. Suppose I did persuade Ileth to let us out. Suppose she comes over to our side--which I tell you right now she won't--but suppose she did. What possible chance would the five of us have against sixty armed desperate men and women? Hell, Murdock, we couldn't even get the ship back to Earth by ourselves!" He hesitated. "Besides it strikes me as a contemptible stunt...."

Murdock's cold blue eyes flashed. He sat up, swinging his feet to the deck. "Do you think we're playing a game?"

Mercedes, the gray-haired woman, interrupted, "Don't nag him, Murdock. Everyone isn't a cold-blooded monster like you."

The T.I.S. agent grunted his disgust, lay back down and rolled to his stomach.

Mercedes was a pleasant-faced, middle-aged woman with bright black eyes like a parrot.

"I don't see yet," she continued imperturbably, "how General Atomic could contact everyone before we sailed." She smoothed her skirts, sitting primly on the brig's only chair, and cast a sly look at Murdock. "Not with the vaunted T.I.S. on guard."

"Humph!" came Murdock's muffled voice from the pillow. "What's so damned impossible about that? We couldn't watch the beggars all the time." He rolled back and sat up again.

"No. What bothers me is why they didn't give themselves away. They were investigated. All of them were reputable Government men, their fathers Government men before 'em."

"It's hard to refuse a million credits," Saxon pointed out.

Murdock's pale blue eyes jerked to Saxon. "How do you know?"

Before Saxon could reply, Mercedes said, "General Atomic offered us all a million credits. They did to me and Brand, I know. We reported it to the T.I.S."

"Yeah," said Murdock with a frown. "Yeah, and we questioned them with the lie-detector. Not once, but every time they left the building. They were psychoanalyzed and searched. And every damned one of them was certified loyal to Government. They never gave a sign that they'd sold out to General Atomic, not a sign. Why, the bums acted as if they didn't know it themselves."

"They didn't!" put in Saxon.

Their eyes swung back to the burly nuclear physicist. He read scepticism, doubt, curiosity in their minds.

"What do you mean??" Murdock exploded.

"I mean just what I said. They actually didn't know that they had sold out to General Atomic until after the Little Death. It's simple enough. I'm surprised no one's thought of it before. Ever since Charcot back in the nineteenth century....'"

"Hypnotism!" Villainowski burst out. "That's it, of course! Post-hypnotic commands!"

Saxon nodded. "I wasn't sure. I'm not sure even yet." But he was. He had known it the moment he had looked into Ileth's mind the day of the mutiny.

Murdock frowned, said "Post-hypnotic commands? I don't follow you."

"There's nothing mysterious about it, actually," explained Saxon. "When the men sold out to General Atomic they must have submitted to being hypnotized by GA's neuro-psychoanalyst. They could be given orders while in the hypnotic state, then commanded to forget them, forget in fact that they had sold out to General Atomic until after the Little Death. The Little Death was to act as a post-hypnotic command, recalling their memories and instructions."

"By Pluto!" ejaculated Murdock. "I believe you've hit it!" He regarded Saxon with increased respect.

The slight, homely Villainowski rubbed a nine day's growth of beard, musing, "It was a beautiful scheme. Then men couldn't betray themselves. They couldn't be tripped up by the lie-detector because they honestly believed they were still loyal to Government."

Again Saxon nodded. "I was trying to find Q62," he said, "when Ileth was Q62 all the time, although she didn't know it until she woke up from the Little Death."

* * * * *

Brand, the bio-chemist, who had been lying on an upper bunk silently listening, broke into the conversation. "But why did General Atomic wait until after the Little Death before having their men seize the ship? It doesn't make sense. I should think they'd want to get the drive to one of their laboratories, where it could be examined as soon as possible."

It was Murdock who replied. "That's not difficult to explain either. General Atomic couldn't afford to take a chance. If they'd grabbed the _Shooting Star_ within reach of Government's space navy, they would have been apprehended sure. Remember, every observatory in the System had us in view until we went into the time field.

"No one but Villainowski knows how to use the stellar drive, so they couldn't have used that to escape. But after we reached Alpha Centauri we were beyond reach of the electronic telescope on Luna, even beyond radio contact. Their engineers would have a chance to examine the drive and learn enough to operate it, at least. They could return then. Nothing can catch the _Shooting Star_ when she's operating in the Little Death."

Saxon listened with somber eyes to the T.I.S. agent's explanation. It was right, he felt, as far as it went. But it didn't account for the aliens, nor for Saxon's strange experiences during the Little Death, nor the death of that N.P.A. before they sailed.

He heard the door to the brig click and glanced up just as it slid aside.

Ileth Urban stood in the entrance.

Ileth's green jodphur-like trousers emphasized her long legs and slim waist. Her black shoulder length hair had been pushed back, disclosing small peaked ears.

She came inside, with a look of determination, and the guard closed the door behind her, but didn't lock it.

"I ..." she began, caught Saxon's eyes and blushed furiously. Unconsciously her chin went up and she squared her shoulders. "I don't know how to say what I've come to tell you." Again she hesitated, biting her lip. "I think it'll be good news...."

"Good news?" echoed Murdock sarcastically. "Have the crew been massacred by Centaurians?"

"There's no sign of living Centaurians yet," she replied. "Not on this planet anyway."

"Living Centaurians?" asked Murdock. "What do you mean 'living' Centaurians? What have you found?"

The silence was alive. Saxon could feel the intangible fear of deep space grip every one of them. There was, he realized, a decided pathologic quality about it, as if every one of them were not quite sane on the subject.

"A city," said Ileth in a suppressed voice.

There was a quick intake of breaths.

"Yes," she went on, "a city. About twenty-five kilometers northeast of here. A perfectly huge city without a single inhabitant."

"What planet is this?" Villainowski asked suddenly.