Dilullo's voice did the whip-crack again. "Let's not have so much weeping. Exactly what happened?"
McGoun knuckled his moist eyes. "Don't push me around. I've been pushed around too much. All alone here, for weeks and weeks. They would come back to their bodies and I'd plead with them, and they wouldn't even listen to me. They'd just eat, and drink, and stare at me, and then go back out there."
"Come back to their bodies?" cried Bollard. "What are you trying to give us?"
McGoun looked dully at him. "You don't believe it? You walk out onto that grid and see. I tried it—it was terrifying. I came right back to my body and I wouldn't try it again. But Ashton and the others kept going and going ..."
"Oh, nuts," said Bollard. He told Dilullo, "John, if that's Ashton's body out there, we'll need it, to take back to Earth for identification. I'll go out and get it."
"Now wait," said Dilullo. "Let's wait a minute before we do anything foolish."
"Let him go," said McGoun, his face sodden with resentment. "He's so damned ready to call me a liar. Let him try it."
"Where's the flier you came in?" Dilullo asked.
McGoun made a gesture. "Down below that side of the mountain. But it's no good without Ashton. You know—when I threatened to take the flier and go if they didn't quit the Free-Faring, Ashton took and hid some of the small parts v Without them the flier can't operate."
Chane, sitting with his laser across his knees just clear of the tunnel-mouth, glanced toward Vreya. She had not spoken. But she stood there, her eyes brilliant with emotion, gazing toward the glassy disk out there on which the three men lay.
She looked, he thought, like someone who after long hope and despair sees the gateway of a prison stand open and inviting. He began to wonder. Could what
McGoun said be true? Could the men out there be, not dead, but with their minds set free to range all the universe at will?
The hackles came up on Chane's neck at the thought. He did not like such an idea at all. He had been a Starwolf and a free ranger and raider, but physically. Everything in his Varnan training made him recoil from a concept such as this one of using your mind to rove without your body.
A sudden thought came to Chane. Was this Free-Faring what the Varnans had found when they came to raid the Closed Worlds, long ago? Had the thing seemed as repulsive to them as it did to him, a thing from which they would recoil? Was that why Star-wolves had been forbidden ever to go to Allubane?
"I tell you, it's true," McGoun was saying, in a high, sobbing voice. "Look, you don't have to take my word. Just walk out there on the grid and see what happens to you."
Chane noticed that Bollard still looked skeptical, but that Dilullo had a look on his face as though he was not too sure.
"You tell me that this thing can take a man's mind and release it from his body ..."he began.
"It can!" cried McGoun. He pointed down to the floor of the giant shaft, where the central circle glowed with cold blue light. "That down there. It emits a force, straight upward. A column of quite invisible force. The glass-looking grid out there is transparent to it."
And if that is so, Chane thought, the force would strike right on up into the sky, and would hit the two Arkuun fliers and cause the thing that had happened to them.
"You tell them, Garcia," appealed McGoun. "I'm not a scientist; I'm a trader, trying to make an honest profit. I wish to God now I'd never heard of this thing."
Garcia said, hesitatingly, "All I know of the theory of it is what Ashton told me. The glowing area down there is matter so treated as to emit a subtle force perpetually. The force is one that amplifies the power of that electric pattern in the brain which we call the mind. It gives the mind-pattern such great power that it can break loose from the synaptic structure in the brain. It can go where it wills, short-cutting the three dimensions by driving across dimensions of which we know nothing. It can return, and affix itself to the brain again, and reactivate the body."
"Oh, for God's sake...." Bollard began.
Chane whirled and triggered his laser back into the long tunnel. The flash and crack were tremendous in that closed space.
They ran to the tunnel, keeping clear of its mouth. Dilullo looked enquiringly at Chane.
Chane shook his head. "Nobody coming. Just a stone or something someone threw into the tunnel, to see if anybody was on guard. I thought I'd better let them know we're here."
"This is a nice spot," Dilullo muttered. He turned and asked McGoun, "Is there another way out of here?"
McGoun shook his head. "No way but the tunnel."
"Then they've got us nicely boxed," said Dilullo. "We've got rations and some water in our packs, but we can't hold out here forever."
"Look," said Bollard. "There's no need to hold out forever.
We'll get Ashton's body off that grid—if it's dangerous to go near it, we can snake it off with a rope. We'll come out of the tunnel with all lasers going and cut right through them."
"Ashton will die if you do that," warned McGoun. "His mind can't regain his body unless it's out there on the grid, in the force of the Free-Faring."
Bollard looked as though he was about to make a highly profane reply, but Dilullo held up a hand and silenced him.
"What's that?"
A voice came booming down the tunnel, a man's strong voice speaking as through a long tube.
"I am Helmer. Can I come in truce?"
Dilullo said admiringly, "That man's got guts. He must know that one laser blast down the tunnel would cut him down."
"Well, do we cut him down?" asked Milner hopefully.
"No, we don't," said Dilullo. "Bollard, you've got the loudest mouth here when you want to use it. Call to him that he can come in truce."
Bollard obeyed. They waited. Then they began to hear a man's steps echoing down to them through the long metal tube. They were firm steps, strongly planted, and they got louder and louder, and then Helmer stepped out of the tunnel and stood looking at them.
In the vague light, Helmer seemed twice as impressive as he had in sunlight, his blond head erect, his mighty arms and legs all sculptured muscle, his bleak, icy eyes surveying them one by one.
Then Helmer turned his gaze out into the vastness of the shaft. He looked at the grid and the three motionless bodies on it, and then down at the glowing circle below.
A kind of agony came upon his face as he looked. He seemed to speak rather to himself, than to them.
"So it is true, and there is one of the evil things still left. And after all this time, it has been found."
His lips compressed. He seemed to stand and think for a moment, before he turned and spoke to them.
"Listen to me, strangers. This thing you have searched for and found has great and luring powers. That is true. But also it is a greatly evil thing."
"What evil would come from a thing that is supposed merely to free the mind from the body?" asked Dilullo.
Helmer's eyes flashed cold flame. "You saw the dead cities in the jungle? Go ask them! They were great and living cities once. But each of them had a thing like this, the instrument of the Free-Faring. And the sterile life of the mind was more alluring than the real life of the body, and hundreds by hundreds, century after century, the people of those cities went into the Free-Faring and clung to it until they died."
He looked around their faces again. "The people of the cities withered away, the life dwindled. Until finally a group arose, determined to destroy the Free-Faring and save our people from its insidious corruption. In one city after another, the gateways— like this one—were destroyed. But those who were addicted to the Free-Faring tried to save it, and we have always known that at least one of the gateways remained hidden and intact. Because of that, we determined to close our worlds to strangers, so that not all the galaxy would flock here searching for it. As you have searched—and found."
Dilullo shook his head. "The thing is only an instrument of science. If it does what they tell me it can do, it could be a
very noble instrument for all men."
Helmer flung out his hand and pointed toward the three unmoving bodies out on the central grid.
"Look at those who have tasted the Free-Faring! Do they look ennobled? Or do they look drunken, sodden— like dying men?"
"I agree," said Chane.
Helmer turned and looked at him. "Stranger, when I saw you before, I thought that you were more of a man than any outworlder I had met. Now I see that you think like a man."
"I do not agree!" cried Vreya. Her face was passionate as she looked stormily at Helmer. "It was fanatics like you who took away from us the freedom of the stars.'' She turned and pointed at the glass grid, where the three men lay unmoving. "That is the road to infinite freedom, to go anywhere in the universe, to find out anything we wish to know—and you would destroy it."
"I will destroy it," said Helmer. "It almost destroyed us, long ago. I will not have this hateful vice corrupt our people again—or any other people."
He turned to Dilullo. "This is what you can do. You can gather your people and go, and we will strike no blow at you."
"But," said Dilullo, "they tell me that if Ashton and the other two are taken off that grid, their minds cannot rejoin their bodies."
"That is the truth," said Helmer. "And it is well. They will be living logs until they die, and that is their punishment."
"No," said Dilullo decisively. "It is the safety of Ashton that is our job, and we cannot do that to him."
"Then," said Helmer slowly, "you will all perish when we destroy the Free-Faring. The choice is yours."
He turned his back on them and strode toward the tunnel. Milner, his teeth showing in a soundless snarl, started to raise his laser but Dilullo knocked it down. Helmer went on into the tunnel.
Chane saw Dilullo turn and give him a cold stare. "Why did you say you agree with him?"
Chane shrugged. "Because I do. I think a thing like this is better destroyed."
"You're a fool and a coward," Vreya said to him. "You're afraid of something you can't understand, afraid of the Free-Faring."
"Frankly, I am," said Chane. He pointed with his laser to the unmoving men out on the grid. "If that's what this fine achievement does to a man, I want no part of it."
He looked back to Dilullo. "Now what?"
"That," said Dilullo, "is the kind of a question that makes a Merc leader wish he wasn't a leader."
"Accept Helmer's terms!" McGoun broke in. His soiled cheeks quivered. "Ashton didn't care about me, all alone here. Why risk getting killed for him?"
"Because," said Dilullo between his teeth, "we signed a contract, and Mercs who break one are thrown out of the guild. It was you, McGoun, with your nosing around in other world's secrets and your hankering for money, who brought us all here. Now shut up."
"But what do we do?" asked Bollard.
"We wait," said Dilullo. "We wait till Ashton and the other two come back to their bodies—if what McGoun has said is true— and we grab them, and then we fight our way out."
The great shaft was darkening as the moons of Arkuu slid further down the sky, so that little of their light now penetrated.
Dilullo told Janssen and Bollard to take the second watch at the tunnel, and that they had all better get some sleep. They curled up silently, along the back of the ledge, and presently were asleep. All but Vreya.
Chane watched her. She was sitting and staring almost fixedly at the grid out there, and the three motionless figures on it. She watched it for a long time, before she too stretched out to sleep.
Milner looked around the vast, darkening place. "That ruined city was bad enough," he muttered. "This is worse."
"Don't talk," said Chane. "If any of them try coming through the tunnel, our hearing will be our best warning."
But, looking around, he had to agree that Milner was right. He had never been in a place so curiously oppressive. It was not so much the place itself as the knowledge of what it could do to a man, drive the mind out of his body, make him like one dead. The strong repulsion to that idea stirred in Chane again.
The hours seemed long before their watch ended. Janssen and Bollard, when roused, grunted and took their places at the tunnel, Bollard yawning prodigiously.
Chane took his boots off and stretched out, but he found that sleep came slowly. He still felt the oppression. It seemed to stifle him. He kept thinking of the three shadowy forms out on that dim grid, wondering where their minds were and what they were doing; wondering what it was like to be a disembodied mind; wondering if they would ever come back. After a time he did sleep, and he had something almost unheard of for him; nightmares.
He woke out of one with a start. There had been a sound, not the occasional stirrings of Bollard and Janssen as they sat staring down the tunnel, but a new, small sound.
He looked around sharply. Vreya was gone.
Chane got to his feet. His gaze swept the vast, darkened space. Then he saw her.
She was walking silently out onto one of the metal walks that led to the central grid. The two guards, their backs to her, had not seen her.
She was going to the Free-Faring ...
Chane moved with the swiftness and silence of a hunting cat. His unshod feet made no sound. He went in great noiseless bounds after the tall golden girl who walked out toward the grid, over the abyss, as though she went to a lover.
He would reach her in time to pull her back, if she did not turn ...
At that moment, warned by instinct or the sound of his breathing, Vreya turned.
She flashed him a fierce, wild look and then started to run forward.
Four great strides and a spring and he could catch her before she stepped onto the grid. Chane strode and sprang, and he did catch her right at the edge.
But he had forgotten how strong Vreya was. Even as he caught hold of her, she threw herself forward onto the smooth grid. Chane, holding her, was dragged by her wild surge onto the grid with her.
Next instant, Chane felt his brain explode, and he fell into eternity.
XV
It was not quite a fall. Rather it was as though a great hand, gently but very strong, had grasped, lifted, and flung him outward, and he scudded, stunned and helpless, across a silent nothingness.
He was nothing, alone in nothingness.
He was dead, a soul, a spirit, a palmful of electric impulses tossed out naked among the stars. Now he knew what it was like to be that way.
He was afraid.
And he was angry. Raging, that this violation should have been done to him.
He screamed, a fierce eagle scream that defied the whole cosmos. He could not hear the scream, but he could sense it as a red flash in the nothingness. And it was answered.
"Don't be afraid, Chane. Don'the angry. Look. Look around you ..."
Vreya. Of course, Vreya, He was not alone. Vreya ...
Look, Chane. Look at the stars. Look at the universe. " She was not talking. There was no voice in that tremendous silence. Yet he sensed her meaning as he had sensed his own outcry. Her words crashed against his consciousness like a sunburst, all golden and glorious. "We're free, Chane! Free!"
He tried to orient himself toward her, tried to see her, and in doing that he saw instead the universe.
The black, black beautiful deeps that ran to the rim of creation, the dark All-Mother with a billion galaxies spangling her breast and the stars like fireflies at her fingertips, and he could see it all, clear and clean. The stars burned with a pure radiance. The coiling nebula glowed, silver clouds against the primal black. All down the long, long darkness the scattered galaxies wheeled and flashed, and he could hear them, and he realized that the nothingness was not silent. It moved and sang with the movements of the suns, the worlds, the moons, the comets, the gaseous clouds, the banks of drift, the cosmic dust and the free atoms, the star-swarms and the galaxies. Nothing was still, and he understood that this was because stillness was death, and therefore forbidden. The universe lived, moved, beat wi
th a vital pulse....
And he was part of it. He too throbbed and moved, caught up in the great cosmic dancing, the Brownian Movement of the universe. Movement of the universe. This evoked a memory, of his body floating in a great sea, becoming one with the life, the pulse, the movement of the sea.
"Vreya!" He called to her, without thinking how he did it. "Vreya, come back with me!" The panic that went with the impulse was black, an ugly black that blotted out the radiance. The memory of his body had done that, reminding him that he was not an atom but a man with a face and a name, Morgan Chane, the Star-wolf. He looked somehow down, although there was neither up nor down, and saw his body sprawled on the grid beside Ashton and Sattargh and Raul. It was sprawled together with Vreya's body, and they looked like the newly dead, mouths slack, eyes glazed, arms and legs flung wide in limp abandonment. He yearned toward his body.
"Vreya, come!"
She was close beside him now. He could sense her there, a tiny patch of sparkling motes.
"You are afraid," she said, contemptuously. "Go back, then. Get your feet on the nice safe ground."
"Vreya... !"
"A lifetime ... waited ... dreaming ... now I have it, I am free, free of the stars, free of the universe. Good bye, Chane."
"Vreya! He flung himself toward the sparkling motes, and he felt her laugh.
"No, you can't hold me now. Do what you will, you can't hold me."
She danced away. The Perseus Arm swung like a burning scythe through the dark behind her, a million stars piled high and shouting as they swung; their voices struck Chane's being and made each separate impulse flare with their splendor. Vreya's tiny gleaming brightened. Once more he felt her laughter, and then she was gone, lost in the blaze of the Perseus suns.
Chane hesitated. He could go back now, revive that disgustingly lax shell that awaited him, make it a man again. Or he could go after Vreya, try again to bring her back ...
If he let her go she might never come back. She was drunken with the Free-Faring, enough to forget the needs of her body until it was too late, until the beautiful shell perished from lack of food and water. And that would be a waste, a terrible waste. He would never forgive himself if that happened ...
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