sunlight and wives waiting for them."

And Valduma—no, she isn't human. Fire and ice and storming madness, but not human. Too beautiful to be flesh.

"This trip was your idea," he said defensively.

"Donovan, you wouldn't have played such a foul trick and made such a weak, self-righteous excuse in the old days."

He looked away, feeling his cheeks hot. "Well," he mumbled, "why not turn around, get out of the Nebula if you can, and maybe come back later with a task force?"

"And lead them all into this trap? Our subtronics are out, you know. We can't send information back, so we'll just go on and learn a little more and then try to fight our way home."

His smile was crooked. "I may have been baiting you, Helena. But if I told you everything I know, it wouldn't help. There isn't enough."

Her hand fell strong and urgent on his. "Tell me, then! Tell me anyway."

"But there is so little. There's a planet somewhere in the Nebula, and it has inhabitants with powers I don't begin to understand. But among other things, they can project themselves hyperwise, just like a spaceship, without needing engines to do it. And they have a certain control over matter and energy."

"The fringe stars—these beings in the Nebula really have been their 'gods'?"

"Yes. They've projected themselves, terrorized the natives for centuries, and carry home the sacrificial materials for their own use. They're doubtless responsible for all the ships around here that never came home. They don't like visitors." Donovan saw her smile, and his own lips twitched. "But they did, I suppose, take some prisoners, to learn our language and anything else they could about us."

She nodded. "I'd conjectured as much. If you don't accept theories involving the supernatural, and I don't, it follows almost necessarily. If a few of them projected themselves aboard and hid somewhere, they could manipulate air molecules from a distance so as to produce the whisperings—" She smiled afresh, but the hollowness was still in her. "When you call it a new sort of ventriloquism, it doesn't sound nearly so bad, does it?"

Fiercely, the woman turned on him. "And what have you had to do with them? How are you so sure?"

 Prev. P 19/47 next