have thought it a ship, though huge, if it had had engines or instruments.... No. It was a ship. Hatcher beside him was proof that these creatures needed neither, not in any Earthly sense, at least. They themselves were engines, with their power to move matter apart from the intervention of other matter. They themselves were instruments, through the sensing of force, that was now within his own power.

A moment's hesitant practice, and McCray had the "planet" in the palm of his hand—not a real palm, not a real hand; but it was there for his inspection. He looked at it and within it and saw the interior nests of Hatcher's folk, found the room where he had been brought, traced his course to the surface, saw his own body in its spacesuit, saw beside it the flaccid suit that had held the strange woman's body....

The suit was empty.

The suit was empty, and in the moment of that discovery McCray heard a terrible wailing cry—not in his ears, in his mind—from the aliens around him. The suit was empty. They discovered it the same moment as he. It was wrong and it was dangerous; they were terrified. The companion presence beside him receded into emptiness. In a moment McCray was back in his own body, and the gathering members let him free.

VI

Some hundreds of light-years away, the Jodrell Bank was making up lost time on its Betelgeuse run.

Herrell McCray swept the long line from Sol to Betelgeuse, with his perceptions that were not his eyes and his touch that was not of matter, until he found it. The giant ship, fastest and hugest of mankind's star vessels, was to him a lumbering tiny beetle.

It held friends and something else—something his body needed—air and water and food. McCray did not know what would happen to him if, while his mind was out in the stars, his body died. But he was not anxious to find out.

McCray had not tried moving his physical body, but with what had been done to his brain he could now do anything within the powers of Hatcher's people. As they had swept him from ship to planet, so he could now hurl his body back from planet to ship. He flexed muscles of his mind that had never been used before, and in a moment his body was slumped on the floor of the Jodrell Bank's observation bubble. In another moment he was in his body, opening his eyes and looking out into the astonished face of Chris Stoerer, his junior navigator. "God in heaven," whispered Stoerer. "It's you!"

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