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 

 Prev. P 12/23 next