withinthe suit. This was obviously to prevent anyone leaving the shipunprotected. Perhaps with this safeguard there was no alarm.
He twisted the lock and entered the chamber. He opened the outer doorand faced the night of space.
* * *
He would not have believed that anything could be so utterly terrifying.His knees buckled momentarily and left him clinging to the side of theport. Sweat burst anew from every pore. Blindly, he pressed the jetcontrol and forced himself into space.
He arced a short distance along the curve of the ship and then forcedhimself down into contact with the hull. He clung by foot and handmagnetic pads, sick with nausea and vertigo.
He had believed that by clinging to the outside of the hull he couldescape detection and endure the flight back to Earth. In his sickness ofbody and mind the whole plan now looked like utter folly. He retched andclosed his eyes and lay on the hull through the beginning of aneternity.
* * * * *
He had no concept of time. The chronometer in the suit was not working.But it seemed as if many hours had passed when he felt a faint shockpass through the hull beneath him. He felt a momentary elation. Theships had separated. The search for him--if any--had been abandoned.
Slowly he inched his way around the hull to get a glimpse of the blackship. It was still there, standing off a few hundred yards but notmoving. Its presence dismayed him. There could be no reason now for thetwo ships to remain together. The Martian Princess should be turningaround for the return to Earth.
Then out of the corner of his eye he saw it. A trace of movement. Agleam of light. Like a small moon it edged up the distant curvature ofthe hull. Then there were more--a nest of quivering satellites.
Without thought, Mel pressed the jet control and hurled himself intospace.
The terror of his first plunge was multiplied by the presence of thesearchers. Crewmen of the Martian Princess, he supposed. The absence ofthe space suit had probably been discovered.
In headlong flight, he became aware of eternity and darkness andloneliness. The sun was a hot, bright disc, but it illuminated nothing.All that his mind clung to for identification of itself and theuniverse around it was gone. He was like a primeval cell, floatingwithout origin, without purpose, without destination.
Only a glimmer of memory pierced the thick terror with a shaft ofrationality. Alice. He must survive for Alice's sake. He must find theway back to Alice--back to Earth.
He looked toward the Martian Princess and the searchers on the hull. Hecried out in the soundless dark. The searchers had left the hull andwere pursuing him through open space. Their speed far exceeded his. Itwas futile to run before them--and futile to leave the haven of theMartian Princess. His only chance of survival or success lay in gettingto Earth aboard the ship. In a long curve he arced back toward the ship.Instantly, the searchers moved to close in the arc and meet him on acollision course.
He could see them now. They were not crewmen in spacesuits as he hadsupposed. Rather, the objects--two of them--looked like miniaturespaceships. Beams of light bore through space ahead of them, and hesuspected they carried other radiations also to detect by radar andinfra red.
In the depths of his mind he knew they were not of the Martian Princess.Nor were there any crewmen within them. They were robot craft of somekind, and they had come from the great black ship.
He felt their searching beams upon him and waited for a deadly, blastingburst of heat or killing radiation. He was not prepared for whathappened.
* * * * *
They closed swiftly, and the nearest robot came within a dozen feet,matching Mel's own velocity. Suddenly, from a small opening in themachine, a slender metal tentacle whipped out and wrapped about him likethe coils of a snake. The second robot approached and added anotherbinding. Mel's arms and legs were pinned. Frantically, he manipulatedthe jet control in the glove of the suit. This only caused the tentaclesto cut deeply and painfully, and threatened to smash the shell of thesuit. He cut the jets and admitted the failure of his frantic mission.
In short minutes they were near the ships again. Mel wondered what kindof reprimand the crewmen of the Martian Princess could give him, andwhat fantastic justification they might offer for their own actions.
But he wasn't being taken toward the Martian Princess. He twistedpainfully in the grip of the robot tentacles and confirmed that he wasbeing carried to the black stranger.
Soundlessly, a port slid open and the robots swept him through into thedark interior of the ship. He felt himself dropped on a hard metalfloor. The tentacles unwound. Alone, he struggled to his feet andflashed a beam of light from the suit flashlight to the walls about him.Walls, floor and ceiling were an indistinguishable dark gray. He was theonly object in the chamber.
While he strained his sight to establish features in the blank metallicsurfaces a clipped, foreign voice spoke. "Remove your suit and walktoward the opening in the wall. Do not try to run or attack. You willnot be harmed unless you attack."
There was no use refusing. He did as commanded. A bright doorway openedin the wall before him. He walked through.
It reminded him of a medical laboratory. Shelves and cabinets of handinstruments and electronic equipment were about. And in the room threemen sat watching the doorway through which he entered. He gazed at thestrangers as they at him.
They looked ordinary enough in their white surgeons' smocks. All seemedto be of middle age, with dark hair turning gray at the fringe. One wasconsiderably more muscular than the other two. One leaned to overweight.The third was quite thin. Yet Mel felt himself bristling like a dog inthe dark of the moon.
No matter how ordinary they looked, these three were not men of Earth.The certainty of this settled like a cold, dead weight in the pit of hisstomach.
"You--" he stammered. There was nothing to say.
"Please recline on this couch," the nearest, the muscular one said. "Wewish you no harm so do not be afraid. We wish only to determine if youhave been harmed by your flight into space."
All three of them were tense and Mel was sure they were worried--by hisescapade. Had he nearly let some unknown cat out of the bag?
"Please--," the muscular one said.
He had no alternative. He might struggle, and destroy a good deal ofapparatus, but he could not hope to overwhelm them. He lay on the couchas directed. Almost instantly the overweight one was behind him, seizinghis arm. He felt the sting of a needle. The thin one was at his feet,looking down at him soberly. "He will rest," the thin one said, "andthen we shall know what needs to be done."
* * *
The sleep had lasted for an eon, he thought. He had a sense of thepassage of an enormous span of time when he at last awoke. His visionwas fuzzy, but there was no mistaking the image before him.
Alice. His Alice--safe.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed, smiling down at him. He foughthis way up to a half-sitting position. "Alice!" He wept.
Afterwards, he said, "Where are we? What happened? I remember so manycrazy things--the vacation to Mars."
"Don't try to remember it all, darling," she said. "You were sick. Somekind of hysteria and amnesia hit you while we were there. We're homenow. You'll soon be out of the hospital and everything will be allright."
"I spoiled it," he murmured. "I spoiled it all for you."
"No. I knew you were going to be all right. I even had a lot of fun allby myself. But we're going back. As soon as you are all well again we'llstart saving up and go again."
He nodded drowsily. "Sure. We'll go to Mars again and have a realvacation."
Alice faded away. All of it faded away.
* * * * *
As if from a far distance the walls of Dr. Martin's laboratory seemed toclose about him and the lights slowly increased. Dr. Martin was seatedbeside him, his head shaking slowly. "I'm so terribly sorry, Mr.Hastings. I thought we were going
to get the full and true event thistime. But it often happens, as in your case, that fantasy lies uponfantasy, and it is necessary to dig through great layers of them beforeuncovering the truth. I think, however, that we shall not have to gomuch deeper to find the underlying truth for you."
Mel lay on the couch, continuing to stare at the ceiling. "Then therewas no great, black ship out of space?"
"Of course not! That is one danger of these analyses, Mr. Hastings. Youmust not be deceived into believing that a newly discovered fantasy isthe truth for which you were looking. You must come back and continueyour search."
"Yes. Yes, of course." He got up slowly and was helped to the outer roomby the Doctor and an attendant. The attendant gave him a glass of white,sweetish substance to drink.
"A booster-upper," laughed Dr. Martin. "It takes away the grogginessthat sometimes attends such a deep sweep. We will look for you day
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