the ship.

Looking at the ship's officers, good friends, companions on a dozen planetside leaves, McCray started to speak, stumbled and was for a moment without words. It was too incredible to tell. How could he make them understand?

They would have to understand. Insane or not, the insane facts had to be explained to them. However queerly they might stare, they were intelligent men. They would resist but ultimately they would see.

He settled his problem by telling them baldly and plainly, without looking at their faces and without waiting for their questions, everything that had happened. He told them about Hatcher and about the room in which he had come to. He told them about the pinkish light that showed only what he concentrated on—and explained it to them, as he had not understood it at first; about Hatcher's people, and how their entire sense-world was built up of what humans called E.S.P., the "light" being only the focusing of thought, which sees no material objects that it is not fixed on. He told them of the woman from the other ship and the cruel, surgical touch on his brain that had opened a universe to him. He promised that that universe would open for them as well. He told them of the deadly, unknowable danger to Hatcher's people—and to themselves—that lay at the galaxy's core. He told them how the woman had disappeared, and told them she was dead—at the hands of the Old Ones from the Central Masses—a blessing to her, McCray explained, and a blessing to all of them; for although her mind would yield some of its secrets even in death, if she were alive it would be their guide, and the Old Ones would be upon them.

He did not wait for them to react.

He turned to the ship's surgeon. "Doc, I'm all yours now, body and soul ... cancel that. Just body!"

And he left them, to swim once more in space.

In so short a time McCray had come to think of this as life, and a sort of interregnum. He swept up and out, glancing back only to see the ship's surgeon leaping forward to catch his unconscious body as it fell and then he was in space between the stars once more.

Here, 'twixt Sol and Betelgeuse, space was clear, hard and cold, no diffuse gas cloud, no new, growing suns. He "looked" toward Hatcher's world, but hesitated and considered.

First or last, he would have to look once more upon the inimical presences that had peered 

 Prev. P 27/29 next