support life inside the installations, and the expense of that air was not an inconsiderable item in the moon's budget. More than once, air consumption on the moon had been the subject of congressional debate. So, rather than risk having a new drain of air entered into the record, Walker Heath's team went out in LSG and worked in LSG, pumping air
only into the blink vehicle itself. This relatively minute amount of air was padded onto LSG issue, tabbed as recreational exploration. The caution seemed rather silly to Sahara. The moon had long since been self-supporting as far as air was concerned, making oxygen from water pumped up from the interior, breaking down other elements from native rock. However, air consumption was something even the most ignorant Earthling senator could understand, and the moon was saddled with the eternal problem of keeping careful books on air and costs. The vehicle was not perfect, but it was in an amazingly good state. Some of the more delicate electronics were replaced as a matter of precaution, although they tested operative, and some minor failures of components were expected, detected and rectified. Some additional monitoring equipment was installed. Weight was no problem. The power contained in old John Blink's drive was capable of handling many times the mass of the vehicle and all it could carry. Although, as a space officer, Sahara was capable of doing emergency repairs on most ship systems, she was not called upon to assist. She went out «backside» with the initial party, riding in open ground cars, and visually inspected the vehicle. She observed the complicated workings of the blink generator, watched Heath and his men begin the check-out procedures. In the following days, she made a cursory examination of the large control complex, which had been used until no less than ten blink ships had left the moon and disappeared. The complex would not be in use on
this last test of a blink vehicle. Instead, the vehicle would be piggybacked to a powerful Earth-moon shuttle ship and lifted out of the moon's weak gravity to space. Heath cannibalized a portion of the control complex to install monitoring and control mechanisms aboard the shuttle. He was in the midst of final ground tests of the equipment when Matt Webb appeared
on the site. Hara, seated at the pilot's controls in the shuttle ship on its pad outside the tank, saw an approaching ground vehicle and alerted Heath, who was inside the tank with portable monitoring equipment attached to the blink vehicle. He called a halt and waddled outside, stood, hands dangling inside the armor, as the ground car swirled up, kicking up lunar dust, and disgorged one lsg-suited figure. «Aha,» Webb said, «caught you.» Hara recognized the voice immediately. «It's all right,» she said to Heath. «It is not all right,» Heath said. «Did you tell him?» «No,» Hara said. «Come off it, Heath,» Matt Webb said. «Half the moon knows you're out here.» «That's dandy,» Heath said. «Can we expect visits from all of them?» «I can't speak for everyone,» Webb said. «Speak for yourself, then,» Heath said. «Say goodbye and let us get back to work.» Webb chuckled. «I thought I'd watch for a while.» «Nothing to see,» Heath said. «I want to see, especially where I'll be riding during the test,» said Webb. «You'll be riding a desk,» Heath answered gruffly, turning to reenter the tank. «I assume that Sahara is to be the pilot,» Webb said. «I can brush up a bit and qualify as backup.» «Forget it,» Heath said, now out of view. «In fact,» Webb said, «I just took a check ride in a shuttle and passed with honors.» «Good for you.» «And there's one other small fact,» Webb said. «I have orders from the secretary to ride herd on you.» «Matt, that's sneaky,» Sahara said. «Not my idea,» Webb said. «The old boy is getting nervous about the
whole deal. I'd advise you to get into space as quickly as possible before he changes his mind. He's afraid of a leak.» «All right,» Heath said. «Let's activate systems seven and nine.» «Heath,» Webb said plaintively, «have you been listening to me?» «Get on board the shuttle,» Heath said. «If Hara needs help she'll let you know.» Once inside the lock, Webb opened his visor and grinned at Hara. «I just thought you'd like some friendly company to take the edge off that old bear.» «You're all heart,» Hara said. «Since you're here, ride that wave monitor. Commander Heath is about ready to put power to the generator.» Actually. Webb turned out in be a valuable man. The technique of piggybacking a ship was one that all cadets practised. It was standard rescue procedure. Hardware was too expensive to be left in space if it broke down. The method had been used a half-dozen times following breakdowns between the moon and Earth. Hara, however, had never been
directly involved in a piggybacking; it was a bit more tricky to perform the operation on the moon rather than in open space. So she was glad to have Webb standing by when she lifted the shuttle and lowered it carefully inside the now open tank to land beside the Blink vehicle. Having a backup man gave her confidence. The landing went smoothly, and the coupling of the ships was, then, a simple operation. Lashed together, the ungainly mass awaited lift-off. In the ten previous tests, blink vehicles had left directly from the moon's surface. Nothing much happens when a blink generator is activated, at least nothing damaging. That had been proven time and time
again in the early testing. The only effects are slight prickling feelings in all humans within a few hundred kilometers and an electromagnetic disturbance, detectable for hundreds of thousands of kilometers. A generator cranked up to full capacity on the moon would signal a chance observer on earth, any observer who happened, at that moment, to be using the proper detection instruments. Therefore, the plan was to lift the vehicle with the shuttle's power, drive it into deep space, far enough away from both the moon and Earth so that the start of the blink would not signal itself to one of the large number of researchers doing work in gravity, fields and magnetics. In the dark of a moon night, the two piggybacked ships lifted off, a crew of three aboard the shuttle. Heath had programed a course vertical to the
plane of the Earth's orbit, up and away in the general direction of Polaris. The initial stage of the trip was uneventful. The distance chosen for the tests was roughly half the distance to Mars. That was far enough to prevent any chance detection of the blink start, but not far enough away to
prevent detection of the blink itself, should anyone inside the solar system or within a few light-years be using instruments that could detect the subtle signal a blinking ship sent ahead of itself. Those instruments were of a highly specialized nature and would not likely be in use. The shuttle ship had been built to carry as many as 20 passengers plus several hundred tons of cargo. Three people felt lost aboard her. Large unused areas seemed to add to the loneliness engendered by their enforced wheel watches. They took four-hour shifts. Heath spent some of his non-watch time making final checks of the equipment. There was little
socializing. The demands of keeping tabs on all the potential disasters that a ship under power is prone to left one drained at the end of a watch and made the bunks in the rather spacious quarters very inviting. Short, or relatively short, space trips seemed to Hara to be more boring than the long run out to the Centauri systems. At first, the power was the same, but to allow proper deceleration time, power was cut early, and the ship coasted at interplanetary speeds much lower than the speeds attained after months, years of acceleration on the star runs. With the power down, they had time for partial relaxation during the brief period before turnaround and deceleration. Deceleration is always an uncertain time, because the power, which has been cut back, is turned up to full in a very short space of time, and enough stored-up energy is unleashed to vaporize a ship and make a small, temporary star where no star was before. But deceleration went smoothly. With the vehicles dead in space, Hara joined Walker Heath in lsg and crawled outside into the cold and loneliness to separate the two ships. She had been outside many times before, and she never tired of it.
There was danger, yes. A severed lifeline meant a slow drift away; it took a very sharp pilot to locate a single human form in the vastness of space in the time limit imposed by the amount of air stored in an lsg. But there was also beauty. The sun viewed through shielded visor. The gleam of the raw light on the metals of the two ships. The feeling of being alone in a universe that was, at best, indifferent. Hara accomplished her tasks quickly and watched as Heath finished his. Then, back inside the coziness of the shuttle's control room, everyone visibly relaxed. At the console, Hara fed steam to small steering jets. The shuttle moved
slowly, gravely, away from the blink vehicle. Once in position, Heath called
a rest period, during which all three of them slept. Later, fully refreshed, they gathered in the control room. The blink vehicle was enlarged on the visuals, riding dead in space 200 kilometers away toward Polaris. All systems were go. As if talking to himself, Heath outlined the first test. «We're going very, very short. Shorter than ever before. I'm going to send her a mere 2,000 kilometers, and she'll still be detectable on visual if she comes out.» They could feel it, the slight prickling sensation, the tension. Incredible power was being built up in the generator of the ship riding 200 kilometers away. That power swept over them, through the metal hull, telling them of the blink ship's readiness even as they watched the dials and gauges, which confirmed what they could feel for themselves. There were no dramatics, no countdown. When the power was ready, Heath pushed the button. Where there had been a ship there was nothing, and where there had been nothing, 2,000 kilometers away, the blink vehicle sat, dead in space. All motion had occurred outside time and space as detected by human senses. «Good,» Heath said quietly. She had gone out of normal space and she had come back to it. For the second time in the history of man, a ship had been blinked and had not gone off into that unexplained nothing, which had eaten the previous ten blink vehicles. There was a mass of data to be processed. Heath worked for ten hours without sleep. Then he was ready to try again. Once again there was the feeling of tension, the prickling sensation. Once again Heath quietly pushed a button, and the blink vehicle returned
to its original spot in less than an instant. It was there, whole, looking as though it had never blinked out of time and space to travel 2,000 kilometers out and 2,000 kilometers back. And once again the data was correct and contained no surprises. Heath, without sleep for 20 hours, called a break. The next jump would be 20,000 kilometers. CHAPTER SEVEN When the alarm went off, it took Plank a microsecond to place the system that was calling to him so urgently. Then he was in it and feeling the surge of power which told of a jump. He kicked relays with his mind, but it was already too late, for the signal had been of such duration that not even electronic reflexes could react before it had come and gone. He had never heard that particular alarm before, not in the months he'd been blinking in and out of the star systems of the arm. Yet he knew
its importance. There, at the end of that signal was a ship, a ship using the
power of the stars to pull itself out of time and space. That signal, so very brief, was a ship sending a telltale disturbance ahead of itself. And the source of that signal was something that interested him vitally. Something like him. Plank, of course, did not sleep. And for ten hours he maintained full alertness. In that time he familiarized himself with the little-used system that had signaled the blink of a ship somewhere in the galaxy. When the second signal came he was prepared. He had analyzed that part of himself and had made minor alterations. When the blink signal shot through his cold circuits, which were a part of him, he started a fix and cursed when the signal ended before the process was complete. But he had some information. He had a general direction, and his knowledge, knowledge of which he had been totally unaware prior to the first signal, told him that the distance was limited to a range of less than 1,000 light-years. For the first time since he had begun his star wanderings, he leaped stars, blinking down the Orion Arm in a giant step, taking time, after the blink was complete, to orient himself. He looked for the familiar star groupings and recognized the ball park, but he was as yet unable to find first base. He was still lost. There was nothing to do but wait. CHAPTER EIGHT «Could have been faulty technique,» Walker Heath was saying. «Ten times?» Webb asked. «With every space scientist who was anyone checking and double-checking?» «I know,» Heath said. «I was there.» «All right,» Hara said. «What did we do different?» «Nothing,» Heath said, running his hand through his dark, graying hair. «Except cover shorter distances.» «The first test of your series was a short jump,» Webb said. «One light-year,» Heath said. «And she came back.» «A light-year?» Webb frowned. «That's not short.» «When we lost her on the second blink out we began to cut down. Half a light-year, then a quarter on the remaining tests.» «Actually, then,» Hara said, «we're doing exactly what you did before and we've accomplished the same results. You got one ship back. We've got one ship back.» «From 2,000 kilometers,» Heath said. «So it is not the distance traveled that's critical,» Webb said. «At least not apparently. Your first test was successful before and now the first one of ours is successful.» «Cross your fingers,» Hara said. «I'm not going to, but if you think it might help don't let me stop you,» Heath said. The blink vehicle went out 20,000 kilometers and did not disappear. It was there, detectable on the instruments of the shuttle ship. When the data was processed, Heath pushed the button to bring her home, 200 kilometers away from the shuttle. «Good,» Heath started to say, as the vehicle materialized on the visuals. He didn't get the word out. The vehicle appeared, intact, for a period long enough to register not only on instruments but human eyes, and then it wasn't; before it wasn't, it altered its shape, breaking into planes and colors that reminded Hara of the work of some of the twentieth-century cubist painters. Heath punched full magnification into the visuals, sending beams searching out into the emptiness. There was nothing. «I saw it,» Hara said. «It was there.» «The blink was complete,» Webb said. «Power was off.» «Whatever happened to it happened in normal space,» Hara said. «Yes,» Heath agreed. «But we don't know what happened when it was in the blink. Ships don't break into distorted planes and disappear without reason.» «Some unknown stress factor,» Webb suggested. «We'll sweep the area,» Heath said. «If it merely broke up in normal space we'll find debris.» But he was not to make his sweep. «Communicator,» Hara said, her eye caught by a flashing light. «Someone is trying to call us.» «Might as well answer,» Heath said. «If it's moon base, we'll have to tell them about it sooner or later anyhow.» Hara hit switches and the voice which filled the control room was raspy, masculine. «… shuttle ship. Come in shuttle ship.» «Go ahead,» Hara said, without identifying procedure. «This is Plank's Pride…» «John,» she said quietly. «… moon based. caII 7-w-xx-3467. Please acknowledge and identify yourself.» «John Plank,» she said, «This is Hara. Where are you?» «Just off your port viewer,» Plank said. She looked. There was nothing. Then a gleaming globe was riding there, majestic, unknown. She felt a chill of fear, but Plank's voice was there, soothing. «Hara, I want you to board. Only you. Do you understand?» «I'm afraid we'll have to ask some explanation,» Matt Webb said. «No explanation. Not now. Just Hara. I'll light the port to the lock. I'll do the maneuvering.» Already the globe was moving, appearing larger as it neared the shuttle. «That's no Earth ship,» Heath said. «And it came in on a blink.» «I'm going,» Hara said, moving toward her LSG. CHAPTER NINE She stood, magnetic shoes clinging to the hull of the shuttle ship, and watched the alien globe move in. The alien was roughly twice the mass of the shuttle. She admired the workmanship. The full glare of the sun on the globe revealed no seams. Viewports were blackened from the outside, giving the ship a look of solidness. The symmetry of the globe was broken only by protrusions, which she thought looked suspiciously like weapons pods. Hara was one of those fortunate individuals who, in times of stress, become almost artificially calm. It seemed that all of her bodily processes slowed, heartbeat easing off by six to eight beats a minute, pulse slowing, making for an awareness, which seemed as if she were storing her resources for impending crisis. As the globe moved slowly nearer, she
checked her safety line, coiled it carefully. When the ship was a mere three meters away, closer than safety allowed, she said, «That's close enough, Plank.» A light glowed on the dark sphere and in the soundlessness of space a port opened to reveal a lighted air lock. Cutting the power to her boots, she gauged the distance and floated slowly across the gap to catch herself, hands on either side of the open lock. «Disengage,» John Plank's voice told her. She undipped the lifeline to the shuttle, breathing now on the lsg system. She moved inside the lock and the port slid closed. As the lock filled, she could hear the hiss of incoming air. She tested the ship's atmosphere and found it to be Earth normal. That was a bit rich for shipboard living but not surprising in view of the advanced technology evinced by the ship itself. The inner door to the air lock hissed open. Ahead of her was a corridor. «Down the hall to the left,» Plank's voice told her. She walked ahead and felt her weight. «Gravity Earth normal?» she asked. «Would you like it lowered?» Plank asked. «I've been either in space or on the moon for a long time.» «Moon standard, then,» Plank said. She felt the immediate easing of weight. «That's quite a trick, Plank.» «You ain't seen nothin' yet,» said Plank, chuckling. She had reached the main compartment. There was, of course, no one in it, but it was more luxuriously furnished than any ship cabin she'd ever seen. The huge viewports offered the blackness of space, and, at a distance of several hundred meters, the shuttle ship. She had detected no movement. She watched to see if the ships were still moving apart. There was no apparent motion. «You'll be more comfortable out of lsg.» Plank said. She took his suggestion. «Actually,» he said, «I just wanted to look at you.» He was seeing her as he'd never seen her before, from all angles, from a viewpoint that enveloped her. And she was more beautiful than he remembered. «I always thought you looked good in uniform,» he said. «I'd like to see how you look,» she said. «All right,» he said. «First, however, I want you to take the grand tour. See how you like the new Plank's Pride.» «Something's wrong, isn't it, Plank?» «It depends on how you look at it,» he said. She began walking, taking a route that led toward the center of the ship. She looked into living quarters of spacious comfort, a galley equipped with gadgets whose use was uncertain, but guessable. She saw the huge cargo hold and the small vehicle there, lingered for a moment in front of the manlike thing standing silent and obviously mechanical in a niche in the cargo-hold wall. «A statue of Plank?» she asked. «Something like that,» Plank said. In the power room she saw the first evidence of what made the ship work. Nowhere in her tour had she seen any exposed controls, gauges, dials. Nor were there any in the power room; only a small cube, totally encased, with shielded conduits running from it was evident. «Care to explain this?» she asked. She was talking to an empty room, but obviously the entire ship was wired for sound. When Plank spoke his voice seemed normal, but it came from specific points of origin in each room, hidden speakers. «It draws on the power of the stars. It's a sublight drive.» «Like the blink generator?» «I'm not familiar with that,» Plank said. «No, I guess you wouldn't be,» she said. «It was top security.» «Tell me about it.» «Not yet,» she said. «Not until I see you.» «Back along the central corridor. I'll open a door.» The door opened in a blank wall. She entered a small room. Four bare walls met her. Then, in one wall, a port. «Here,» Plank said. She stepped forward. The brain was encased in a clear, circular crystal. From the crystal a worm's nest of conduits and tubings disappeared into the walls of the compartment. For the first time she felt a small surge of anxiety. «I guess it's time to talk,» Plank said. «I think so,» she agreed.
«It's not a long story,» he said, «but I'd feel better if you go back to the lounge and make yourself comfortable.» «All right,» she said. Plank was waiting for her there. He sat, relaxed and confident, legs crossed, in one of the luxurious chairs. Her heart accelerated for a moment, until she saw the slightly unnatural gleam of his skin and knew that she was facing the thing from the cargo hold. «I thought you'd be more at ease this way,» Plank said, «rather than talking to the walls.» «It's a heck of a choice,» she said, laughing nervously. «Would you rather I sent it back?» «No,» she said. «All right. First, to answer the most obvious question, I have no idea. I don't know how it happened. I know roughly when it happened. We lifted off from Armstrong on the way home and that's the last I remember
before I woke up like this. I'm integrated into this ship, and it's some ship. It can leap an infinite distance with no passage of time. It's self-perpetuating. It has all the comforts of home, including the complete library of the old Pride.» «And you've had no contact with whatever or whoever did this to you?» «None.» «No indications aboard ship?» «None. I think it's safe to say that this ship was not built by Earth.» «Yes.» «I seem to be perfectly normal.» He laughed. «At least as normal as I can be under the circumstances.» There was a pause. A section of wall slid away and a star chart appeared on a screen as the lounge lights dimmed. «When I awoke, or whatever, I was here.» A lighted arrow showed his original position. «I seemed to be very interested in getting home, but I didn't know where home was. So I started star hopping along here.» Again the arrow. «The distances are incredible,» she said. «In a year, we could equip 100 ships with this drive,» Plank said. «The theory behind it is deceptively simple. Once you know what to look for you wonder why someone hasn't thought of it.» «Someone has,» she said. «Or at least something similar.» She explained, as best she could, the blink drive. «Yes,» he said. «That's it exactly. And we've had this thing for years?» «It works,» she said, «but then something happens.» When she finished telling of the results in the blink tests, including the last one just before Plank arrived, he was silent. Finally he said, «I have detection equipment aboard which reads a jump. There's a signal that a ship sends ahead of itself.» «I know.» «If the jump is a long one I can locate the point where it will end.» «That's how you got here? You detected the blinks…» «Blinks?» Plank asked. «Our drive was invented by a man named John Blink. Since a blink ship seemed to just blink out of existence and blink into existence somewhere else they called it blinking.» «Yes, I detected the blinks. You must have done two very short ones, then two longer ones. I arrived at the end of the second long blink.» «When the ship disintegrated,» she said. «Yes.» «Did you have anything to do with that?» «No.» «Then the beings who made this ship must have,» she said. «Yes.» «Why?» she asked. «I don't know. There are a lot of things I don't know. Why couldn't I remember the location of my home system? It was blanked totally out of my mind. I would run coordinates and end up in empty space outside the arm. And I had this overwhelming urge to find my home.» «That's only natural,» she said. «And now that I'm here, it's all falling into place,» he said. «I can look out—I have some pretty powerful eyes—and see all nine of the planets. Now I know where old Sol is situated in relation to the big marker stars. It's as if I'd never forgotten. But I feel uneasy.» «Uneasy?» «Why did someone go to all the trouble of integrating my brain into this ship? Why no contact? It happened on the return trip from the Centauri systems. How did I get so far away?» «I think the most important question is this: what are the intentions of the people who built this ship and put you in it?» «I have a sneaky feeling that they wanted me to find Earth. That they wanted to follow me here.» «If that's the case, then they're here,» she said. «I've been scanning,» he said. «The nearest ship is Mars-bound and it's an Earth ship.» «Plank,» she said. «I think it's time we called for help.» «Who?» «Let's start with Commander Heath and Matt Webb. They must be dying of curiosity.» «They've been trying to contact you for ten minutes,» he said. She leaped for her lsg, lying on a nearby couch. «I can patch them in,» he said. Heath's voice was agitated. «If you don't answer,» he was saying, «we're coming in if we have to cut through the hull.» She glanced up quickly. The shuttle, using steering jets, had closed to within a few meters. «I'm all right,» she said. «Hara?» «Yes.» «What's going on?» Heath demanded. «I'm all right. It's John Plank. He's been telling me some very interesting things. Now we want you, both of you, to come on board.» «We'll come one at a time,» Heath said. «All right,» Plank said. «I understand.» «Webb will board first,» Heath said. Matt Webb, weapon in hand, was met at the entrance to the lock by Hara and Plank's mobile form. He insisted on a quick inspection of the ship. He was not shown the compartment where Plank lived. Satisfied, he reported back to Heath and the Commander was soon aboard. «I think you'll have to go through it again, Plank,» Hara said, when the four of them were in the lounge. «First,» Heath said, «what about your friend?» He looked steadily at Plank's mobile form. «I don't understand,» Plank said. «The ship lying 40 kilometers off your stern.» Plank's mobile form showed no visible reaction, but frenzied activity went on inside himself as he used every instrument on the ship. «There is no ship within two light-minutes,» Plank said. «You got visuals on this crate?» Heath asked. «Certainly,» Plank said. Viewports opened. The volume of space behind the new Pride was magnified, searched. «You see? Nothing there.» «It was,» Webb said. «We had it on instruments and on visual. It was contoured like you, round. It was black and silent, except for low-end magnetic disturbances.» Plank's mobile form moved away, turning its back on the three. «You're sure?» «Of course,» Heath said. «He could have blinked out,» Hara said. «Did you feel it?» Heath asked. «No,» she said. «Neither did we.» «You're assuming that his drive is the same as our blink drive?» Hara asked. «We felt him blink in.» «We didn't feel Plank blink in,» Hara said. «Because he arrived at the same time as our test vehicle,» Heath said.
«But we felt the other ship blink in. That's how we spotted it. It was black, light-absorbing. We had to use radar to see it. But it was there.» Plank was feeling a vague uneasiness. «Commander Heath,» he said, «would you please return to your ship and run a check with your instruments?» «Aren't yours better?» Webb asked. «Please,» Plank said. «I'll go,» Webb said. They waited, Heath prowling, investigating, asking questions, which were answered by Plank. Then Webb was on the radio. «It's there,» Webb said. He read the coordinates. Plank searched the area and still found nothing. «Webb,» Plank said, «I can follow your radar beams. I want you to hold the beams on him for a moment.» «Right,» Webb said. Plank was computing. Atop the sphere, a weapon pod rotated. It was aimed at nothing, but the shuttle's beams said there was something. Just before Plank was about to fire Heath gasped. Not far away from them, the shuttle ship was breaking into colorful planes of chaos. Then it was gone. Plank fired at the same moment, but the release of energy from the weapon came just after he felt the blink that told of movement of the unseen ship. Then his wild searching revealed nothing. CHAPTER TEN Matt Webb was gone. Hara would not think the word, dead. He was
gone. The shuttle ship was gone, just as the last of the blink test vehicles was gone. She longed for the familiar instruments of an Earth ship, so that she might search the space around them to confirm what her eyes had told her, that the shuttle had broken into bright, geometric planes and then faded into nothing. Plank assured her that his instruments revealed nothing, but she could not see those instruments, could not read their findings. She had only Plank's word and Plank, himself, was not the Plank she had known, but a disembodied brain in a clear and beautiful crystal substance. An air of crisis hung around them. Outside, nearby as space is measured, their home system continued its eternal march around a star, which had birthed the energy to give them life. The system had not changed. The universe, save for its natural evolution, was unchanging. And yet Hara felt as if something had altered inside her, something that made her realize her life would never be the same. She stood beside
Walker Heath, staring out the viewport, willing her eyes to see the shuttle.
She felt a touch on her arm and turned to look into the almost lifelike face of Plank's mobile form. The hand on her arm was warm, humanly soft. She felt a shudder begin, but cut it off. «Help me think it out,» Plank said. She nodded. «Both of them couldn't be mistaken. I mean about seeing a ship out there, a ship my instruments can't see.» «No,» she said. «It's there,» Heath said. «Or it was.»
«Yes, it blinked out just before I fired at it,» Plank said. «I felt the blink. Why couldn't I see it?» «You're not seeing with human eyes,» Hara said. «You're seeing with ship's instruments. Wouldn't it be possible for those who built you, I mean the ship, to blank away certain areas? Leaving you blind to the ship that both Webb and Commander Heath saw?» Plank considered. «I don't think so. I am literally a part of this ship. I know every micrometer of her. I know the function of every circuit, the beginning and the end of each system.» «And yet you couldn't detect the ship,» Heath said. «But I'd know if there were tampering,» Plank said. «Would you?» Heath asked. «You've been wondering why, when you found yourself out in unknown space, you couldn't relate the position of the Sol system to any known landmark. You admitted that this was strange and you wondered how it could happen. Let's say that brain tampering could explain it. Would you know if someone had been playing about with your mind?» «I don't know,» Plank said. «No,» Heath said. «You would not know.» «Are you saying it was done?» Hara asked. «Very few people know,» Heath said. «Yes, there is a certain amount of preconditioning imposed upon every man who goes into deep space.» «When?» Hara asked unbelievingly. «Remember the final physical? Did you ever hear anyone say, coming out of the physical, that the thing seemed to last forever?» «As a matter of fact, I felt the same way myself,» Hara said, «but there was no loss of time.» «At least you were not aware of any loss of time,» Heath said. «Actually, you lost some three hours and forgetting that three hours was a minor part of the conditioning. The major purpose of the conditioning was to blank out, under certain circumstances, any knowledge of home.» «I think I understand,» Plank said. «I don't, however, like the idea of someone messing around with my mind.» «I think the secretary and others would be interested to know that in your case total memory loss did not occur,» Heath said. «But perhaps your, ah, alteration did not involve enough stress or pain to complete the job.» «Are you saying that if one of us were captured or tortured, that we would be unable to reveal the point of our origin?» Hara asked. «The program was implemented when ships began to disappear,» Heath said. «It was purely precautionary. But there were those who didn't accept the disappearances as being accidents. They feared that our ships were being seized somehow, by some rather powerful aliens. I, for one, argued that if one of our ships were captured as near to home as the Centauri systems, then anyone with a grain of intelligence would be able to cast about in near space and find the only possible source. I lost. Each man going into space was conditioned so that, under stress or torture, his mind would be wiped clean of any knowledge of the solar system, its makeup, its location, its position in relationship to anything in the galaxy.» «But it's so childish,» Hara said. «All an alien would have to do is follow a ship home.» «Man has always been a slightly paranoid creature,» Heath said. «We've always feared the unknown. And something out there, something unknown, was eating our ships. The precaution was somewhat silly, but it eased a few timid minds and allowed us to continue the space program. There were those who wanted to pull in, cease all travel outside the system.» «And you think that something similar to the mind tampering has been performed on me, on my systems,» Plank said. «It's a good guess.» «Excuse me,» Plank said. «I'll be busy for a while.» The mobile extension went off in the direction of the cargo hold. Plank was already withdrawn from it, concentrating himself, sending himself out, checking with minute care each tiny integrated part of himself. Hours later he rested, having found nothing. Hara and Heath were growing impatient. He instructed them on the use of the galley and left them again to return to the crucial area of the ship, the computer. He went painstakingly through all the circuits involved in detection of objects in space and, once again, was blanked. Reason told him than any tampering would be with those circuits involved in perceiving the outside universe. His examination told him that no tampering had been done. His knowledge told him that tampering had been accomplished in a way he could not detect. Irritable and frustrated, he directed a total probe of the volume of space around him, increasing power steadily, extending the circuits to their maximum capacity. Still nothing. The dark ship seen by both Heath and Webb had blinked away.
Perhaps, he thought, it had not, as yet, blinked back. It could be sitting off at limitless distances, awaiting a move. It could detect a jump. He programed a jump, out past the orbit of Pluto, and made it. Hara demanded to know what was going on, having felt the buildup of power in the generator. He told her, rather moodily, to bear with him. He had been
especially alert for the feel of a blinking ship, but the feeling of his own blink, he knew, would override the feel of another ship blinking nearby. He had to assume, however, that his dark companion was now with him. Once again he threw full power into the detection circuits, finding nothing. He increased power steadily, feeding it in from other sources,
exceeding the capacity of the circuits until, overloaded, a circuit blew. The redundancy system switched in and the ship began repair on the blown circuit. He fed power in and blew the standby circuit before repairs were completed. This blinded him in one sector for several minutes before the repaired circuit was completed. He was acting purely on hunch and in desperation. One by one he overloaded the circuits in the detection system and one by one they were repaired. By watching the repair process he learned. Materials were being manipulated at the atomic level, the system drawing on a bank of stored atoms, building tiny components a block at a time to replace the microscopic circuits as he destroyed them. And after hours of destruction and repair the results were the same. He could not detect any ship within light-minutes of his position. He was convinced, then, that any actions he himself might take were fruitless. A technology able to manipulate materials at the atomic level by preprogrammed automation could plant the blanking device in any repaired circuit. But he was not going to admit defeat. If he had been followed by a ship that had deliberately been blanked from him, then that ship was there for no good purpose. Somehow, the undetectable ship was tied in with the disappearance of the shuttle and the blink test vehicle and, consequently, with the disappearances of all the ships lost between Earth and Centauri. There were no access ports to the inner workings of the ship. It had not been designed for human repair. Still there was a way. In the well-stocked tool bin of the ship were torches, meters, handtools. He had long since been aware of their presence and was, at first, puzzled until he realized that they were duplicates of tools that had been carried on the old Pride. Perhaps those who had put him aboard the ship had considered his tools to be on a par with his library, something to make him more comfortable, or to amuse him. At any rate they were there, and with the help of Hara and Heath, he transported the necessary items to the proper area of the ship and very carefully cut into the covering, exposing the detection circuits. Then, one by one, using scrap materials from his tool bin, they began to replace the self-repairing circuits in one side of the system. It was necessary, due to the crudeness of their materials, to sacrifice some of the efficiency, some of the range. However, as testing followed the insertion of each man-made substitute, the thing worked. Since each circuit was a part of himself, Plank could know its function and could
direct his mobile extension and the others to jury-rig a substitute. It was a tedious, time-consuming process that went on and on through circuit after circuit until Hara began to sag with fatigue. «One more, then we'll take a break,» Plank said, although he intended to continue working through his mobile form. The circuit was bypassed, then replaced. A test was run. The sensitive system was no longer perfect. There was distortion and noise, but there was something else. It was near, very near, arrogantly near. The black ship sat, dead silent in space, a mere 40 kilometers from them. Slowly, carefully, Plank moved weapons to bear on the ship. His first thought was to blast it out of space. Then he reconsidered. He kept the weapons ready. He opened a port, sent his mobile form out in the small vehicle and was ready at any moment to activate weapons which would be swift enough to destroy the dark ship should it begin to build power to blink away. He was alongside within minutes. The ship was much like his own. He searched for a port, found it, locked the small vehicle to the dark globe and found entry surprisingly easy. He flowed into the dark ship, found it to be mechanically the same as his own, and he possessed it. There was no directing brain, only an additional bank of circuits in the computer. Quick analysis of that bank told him its purpose; it was sending information even as he destroyed it with a surge of power that burned both primary and backup systems. Repair would take time, time enough for him to find a way to cut that bank completely away from the computer, time to investigate the ship and see its curious layout. No luxury quarters here. The ship was functional, strictly mechanical. In size and contour, it was the same as his. The interior, however, was given over to one huge bay cut into tiny cubicles, each containing a bed, sanitary facilities and a small store of water and a substance that, upon examination, proved to be an artificial nutrient suitable for human consumption. It was evident that the dark ship was, in essence, a prison ship, designed to transport humans, or some form of life very much like humans. Chilled, Plank hastily returned to the computer and burned the repairing circuits in the bank he had destroyed. To complete the job, he sent the vehicle back to the new Pride, then returned it, Hara aboard with the proper tools, to the dark ship. Then with torch and cutters he permanently severed the sending bank from the ship's computer. CHAPTER ELEVEN There were times when it was possible to forget that the hand that touched her was not his. He could feel the liveness of her, the warmth of her. She was so beautiful. In the moment of respite, he stood in his mobile form and looked at her and saw the depth of her ice-blue eyes, the slightly tousled length of light hair, the form of woman under the well-tailored uniform. Once again he touched her, his hand light on her arm. She looked up. Her smile was radiant. It seemed to him that she, too, was able to forget. Until that moment he had not allowed himself to think of her. The unanswered questions had preoccupied him. Now there was a moment, and the beauty of her sank into him, overwhelmed him; he forgot and his arms went out to hold her. Her smile closed, lips forming for the kiss. Her eyes were heavy-lidded and he could feel. It was a wonderful instrument, containing all the sensory equipment of his original body. He was lost in
the thrill of her and his lips touched and felt the soft parting and the sweet wetness, and suddenly she was cold and stiff in his arms. «I'm sorry,» he said, letting his arms drop. «For a moment,» she said uncertainly. «Yes, I know,» he said. «It won't happen again.» «It's not you,» she said. «It feels.» «Oh, John,» she said, turning away. «Your friend Heath must be climbing the walls by now,» Plank said. «If we find that we have a use for two ships we'll have to rig a manual way to communicate. Right now I want to live with this baby for a while, so why don't you get into the scout and I'll zap you back over to pick up the commander.» Alone, he directed the movement of the small vehicle with a portion of his mind while concentrating on the working of the dark ship. The discovery that it was more heavily armed than his own ship did not add to his confidence. Otherwise it was the same, save for the disconnected bank whose purpose was communication. There, he felt, was the only possible source of new information. Although severed from the main computer of the ship, the unit was still wired into the portion of the computer that directed self-repair, and that work was almost complete. One system was operable, the backup nearly so. It was almost as if the bank of circuits were alive, a self-sustaining unit. For the first time since he had become aware of being the directing
force of a starship he felt the sheer alien strangeness of his surroundings. Man, in his history, had accomplished much, but he had a long way to go before he could call himself master of the elemental building blocks of the universe. Man was still discovering new sub-atomic particles. The beings who had built this ship must, Plank knew, have command of those subatomic particles. The way the ships repaired themselves was astounding, a liquid flow of atomic material forming and growing as if poured into a mold. But the result was the same: mere items of hardware, a bit more sophisticated, perhaps, smaller, more efficient, but hardware nevertheless. And man was a master of hardware. What aliens could build, man could understand. The laws of physics did not change. But he knew that without his ability to be a part of that hardware, to feel it, to flow along its wiring, he would have been hard put to figure out even the first circuit. He had begun to think of his makers, those who had put his brain into a crystal container aboard a starship, as they. They had given him an advantage. He could feel their little gimmicks, quickly understand what they were about. Their hardware became his hardware. He was cautious. He didn't like what he'd found aboard this dark ship, the cell-like rooms. They had sent him wandering around searching for home and it was a lead-pipe cinch that they wanted to fill those cells with humans. He didn't know why, but he was certain it couldn't be for the good of the people involved. Taking away a man's body and putting his brain into a machine showed a certain amount of disregard for the rights of the individual. The communicating bank was the most complicated piece of machinery he'd encountered. It almost defeated him, baffled him long after Hara drew alongside and boarded with Heath. He left them to stare for a moment at his inactive mobile form. He himself, was deep inside the ship. He reasoned that if the communications bank could send, it could also receive. He inspected that section, activated it and waited. There was nothing. It was capable of receiving, but not on a frequency he knew. He had expected it to function much as his own detection gear functioned, a radarlike form of blinking energy out and back. In detecting a distant object, his system blinked waves, sending them not through space but into something else, in and out, in and out, on timed adjustable intervals, longer blinks to detect large objects, shorter and shorter as the search narrowed down. But the communications bank of the dark ship was not geared to receive or send any wavelength in the spectrum. At home, men were still working on communications by biological energy, the still unmastered technique of using the «minds» of plants to send messages. But there was no biological receptor aboard the dark ship. Another form of mental energy? If so, what mentality? The mind of them could be so different as to be removed from human perception. More than anything that had happened, his inability to master the communications bank made him aware of his limitations. What was he up against? Who were they? Super-beings? Because of his integration with a very sophisticated computer, he was superhuman, and
he was still helpless. It seemed futile to think that he could tackle beings capable of slowing atoms and electrons and smaller particles into pre-set designs. Who the hell was he even to think about meeting them head-on and having the smallest chance of success? They would squash him. They could, probably, cause his own atoms to flow, killing all that was left of him, that small, unimpressive mass of gray matter back aboard the new Pride. But man had always been a little crazy. He'd always had that arrogant confidence in his own ability. In the beginning he fought the big saber-toothed tigers, stronger, more adapted to the conditions, almost as intelligent, and he won. He killed mastodons with stone-tipped spears and took on white sharks in their own environs. He did it not so much with his strength as with his brain, and Plank had his brain. A human brain. Somewhere out there was something probably very nasty. Something with some very advanced technology. Something unexplained. But then man had crawled into caves to see what was in the dark and probed into the universe to learn its secrets. Plank made his decision. He would take on the tiger. He prepared himself and hooked the communications bank into the system; there was an immediate rush of sending, which he stopped. He had the message on the computer's memory. It was one blip from the bank, cut off in midblip. He knew he had made a risky decision, letting the bank send, but it had led him to the section of the computer that, he discovered, was full of previous messages, all in the same form. He could find no indication of the energy involved, but whatever it was, it had been translated into mere electronic impulses. In the end, it was quite simple. There is really nothing new, he thought, only things unknown. The blips were squeezed. Lengthening them, slowing them down, he reduced them to computer language, which he understood. And the last message was merely a report on a malfunction that had been repaired. The others were more interesting. They went back to the beginning and contained coordinates that could be placed on the star
charts aboard the Pride, They recorded the position of the first planet he'd explored, the planet he'd called Plank's World with the small, sluglike animals. They positioned his ship at all of the stops, at the beginning and end of each blink. He skipped. The big question to be answered was near the end of the tape. The answer was yes. Yes, the communications bank had sent the position of Plank's last blink. On the tape were the coordinates that would place an alien within visual distance of the sun and the populated planets of the system. He thought of the cold and barren cells aboard the dark ship, cells just large enough to house, with a complete lack of privacy and comfort, 1,000 people. When he first looked at the cells the image of a prison ship had come to him. And if his suspicions were correct, if the dark ship were, indeed, meant to transport humans, then danger was near. With the location of Earth now known to them, they could fill a million such ships with people if they desired. He could not be sure, as yet, that they wanted to fill ships with humans. It was difficult to imagine. Man was no longer a hunted creature. He had outlived such threats. He was no longer prey for larger animals. He felt a surge of anger. Who were they to offer even an implied threat to man? All right, their hardware was a bit more sophisticated, but it was just hardware. They had obviously wanted to find man's home planet. Now they had the information which would bring them to Earth. He couldn't prevent that. The information had already been sent. But he could see to it that man would prove to be the most dangerous game in the universe. He himself had been given the equipment to begin resistance. He did not consult the others lest his plan of action be slowed by their natural caution. He felt the need to move, to do something quickly. He was angered and he had months of frustration to vent on someone, something. In short, he needed something to hit. He reconnected the communications bank and let it send. This time he tracked the transmission and found a general line of direction. The beam, brief and powerful, blinked off toward galactic center. Simultaneously, Plank blinked the two ships after it. In an area of dense stars, he let the bank transmit again. It sent coordinates of the ships' position. He blinked in the direction of the beam and then repeated the process, the short blinks made necessary by the crowdings of the stars. It was a slow process. For the first time man was venturing into the heart of the galaxy: where the giant stars pull with magnificent force; where the emptiness of space is lessened, but not completely full; where deadly bursts of stellar winds blow in confused directions and the mass of neighboring stars influence each other; where planet formation was rare. There was a glory in the viewport. Hara and Heath found it difficult to sleep, wanting to be awake at the end of each blink to see the new spread of stars thicker than the Milky Way of home. At first Hara had been angry. Plank had given them no choice. But now that she was there she was awed; she felt dwarfed more than ever before by the sheer size and mass of the galaxy. Near the galactic core old stars lighted the hulls of the two ships traveling in tandem. The deadly gravity of a black hole tugged at them, forced use of all power, a quick blink away. Blue giants blazed. White dwarfs sported an occasional planet, but these were swept clean by the solar winds of nearby suns. The procedure became monotonous. Because of the closely massed suns, the blinks were short. Each blink was proceeded by a transmission burst from the communications bank. Direction established, the ships followed. And, although it zigzagged, the course was ever inward, toward the core. Finally there was one, carefully calculated jump, and the two ships lay
dead in space at a point ,vertical to the orbital plane of a life-zone planet. Child of a relatively isolated star tucked into a spot in space almost
directly at the core of the galaxy, the planet lived. From space it was blue. It had water. A probe to the edge of the atmosphere showed the envelope of air to be oxygen-based and breathable. A visual scan from the probe magnified the surface, showed vast land areas and huge oceans and vegetation not unlike that of other life-zone planets. The planet was electronically silent. Plank made sure of that before he sent the probe lower. He was aboard the scout in his mobile form. From eight kilometers high, he magnified the land areas, swept them and saw the constructions. He could not call them buildings. They were figments of a nightmare, a tinker-toy set gone wild: towers and spans and geometric and non-geometric shapes smothered one landmass and scattered into others. He searched for signs of life. No waves, no electronics. He was relaying the scene back to the Pride. There, Hara and Heath were as puzzled as he. «They could have been built by humanoids,» Heath said. «Or anything,» Plank replied. He directed a beam of information from the dark ship's communications bank and traced it. It went directly toward a wildly contoured mass of metals and plastics on the eastern shore of the most densely covered landmass. By sheer accident he, in the scout, was in the direct line of transmission as a burst came from the building receiving the beam from the ship. When analyzed, the burst from the land surface proved to be identical to the transmission from the communications bank. «I think we've found a relay station,» Plank said, trying to hide his disappointment. «I think I'm glad no one is home,» Hara said. Plank went down. Entry was simple, accomplished by flowing into the mechanics of the building. Inside there was a confusing maze. Circuitry and components were everywhere. Mechanical devices whose use he could
not even guess cluttered floor areas. Everything was in disarray, but it was more than mere clutter. He checked for power drains and found a few of the devices to be functioning, or at least they were using power. After some fruitless wandering and retracing of his steps upon confronting dead-end corridors, he found the room containing the communications device, much like the shipboard bank, but larger and more powerful. «Send another blip from the bank,» he radioed up to Heath. As part of the communication device, he heard the message come in and be instantly relayed. He was noting the direction when Hara interrupted. «John, a signal just came in.» He had rigged a visual detector. The receiving circuits of the shipboard communicator were left open constantly. He directed the shipboard communicator to send down the message. It arrived in a very brief blip of energy and was stored on the tapes of the landside machine. With great anticipation, he slowed it, replayed it. It was a meaningless rumble of noise. Nothing about it resembled the form of outgoing messages. Puzzled, he relayed it at different speeds, producing not sounds but electronic impulses. Had the impulses been orderly, the outgoing messages, the computer could have read them, extracted information. As a part of the computer, Plank could have read them. But the impulses were not orderly. They were a confusing random nothingness. Noise. Electronic noise. «I guess,» he said for the benefit of Hara and Heath, «We don't speak the same language.» He made brief exploratory excursions on the planet. He found more of the same incomprehensible mechanical jumble. Two things he recognized.
One was a waterfall cascading out of a tall tower into a lake. The other was unquestionably an acceleration chamber for atomic particles. Of all the forms it was the most recognizable. Long, heavily shielded, it stretched a vast distance across a flat plain. He was recording on visual. He was taking samples. The metals were much like the metals aboard the two ships, the tougher alloy used for the ship's hulls being the main construction material of the towers and buildings. Once he tried to enter one of the electronic devices, this one occupying a building roughly the size of an Earth football stadium. For a while, until he extricated himself, he feared for his sanity. The circuitry had no rhyme or reason. It began nowhere and led nowhere and performed no function he could imagine. Again he was struck by the tinker-toy image, this one an electronic tinker-toy assembled by a talented idiot. He emerged a bit frayed at the edges and, having had enough, boarded the mobile form and rejoined the others on the Pride. There, untiring, he busied himself with the one signal that had come into the receiver. Hours later, after Hara and Heath had slept, he told them, «I think it must have been random noise.» «What now?» Hara asked. «We start sending messages to the relay station down below and follow the relays.» Heath was looking at a visual chart of the incoming message. «Plank,» he said, «you want to try something purely on a guess?» «I'm open to suggestions,» Plank said. «How about running this thing through a speaker as just plain old sound.» «Why not?» Plank asked, although he considered the idea rather inane. He rigged the system, translated the electronic impulses into sound waves. When he activated the tape there was a long-drawn-out rumble on the speakers. It was meaningless. Plank shrugged. «So much for man's first communication from an intelligent alien,» he said. «Wait,» Hara said. «Play it again.» Again the long-drawn-out rumble. «Speed it up,» Hara said. The sound was unmistakable. Man's first communication from an intelligent alien was a huge, satisfied burp. CHAPTER TWELVE «Join up with Plank and see the galaxy,» Hara said, with a lightness she did not feel. Once again they were star-roving. This time the process was somewhat more complicated. First, it was necessary to allow the communications
bank to send a signal to the relay station. Then it was a game of intelligent guess and chance to put the Pride and her dark companion ship in the direct path of the narrow beam from the relay station on the core planet. Both ships were used because the equipment needed was aboard the dark globe, and the Pride offered comfort to Hara and Heath. Operations were no problem. Plank could extend his control over both ships with no difficulty. The problem was in calculating each new blink. Although the beamed message generally was in a straight line, it was bent by the huge fields of stars and often, following a new message. Plank missed the beam entirely and had to search for it, sometimes having to return to the last known point. As days went by, it became evident that the new path was leading back in the general direction of Earth, and Plank began to fear that they were already there in the solar system. However, the path began to diverge, aiming toward a point in the Orion Arm more toward galactic center than Earth's sun. There had been no further communication incoming, and Plank began to think that the one reception was a fluke, a bit of space noise or interference. Since he was capable of being in more than one place at one time, and since the more he worked his brain the more it seemed to be able to handle, he was spending some of the time working with Heath and Hara to install manual controls on the Pride. Although Plank saw no great advantage, it gave the other two something to do and made them feel like more than mere passengers. Parts were cannibalized from the dark ship and from redundant systems aboard the Pride. When the makeshift manuals were in place. Plank acted as overseer as Heath directed the Pride into a blink. The new systems worked. Installing the manuals had served another good purpose. Heath, in spite of his abrasive personality, was a good drive engineer. He was now familiar with the complexities of the Pride to a degree second only to the more intimate insights of Plank himself. Back on Earth, Heath would be able to construct duplicate generators. Actually, the drive aboard the Pride was basically a blink generator, with some delicate refinements. Most of the advances were represented by the minute circuitry made possible by the atomic flow technique. Neither Plank nor Heath had command of that. It seemed to be automatic in the repair sequences, and the manner of its accomplishment was a mystery. However, the lack of the ability to flow the atomic material was not a severe handicap. The only sacrifice in building a generator by Earth techniques would be in size, and since power was unlimited with a blink generator in use, size was not the paramount consideration. Heath was now convinced that the blink drive had worked all along. He had evidence. He had seen it work with his own eyes and he'd recorded it on the instruments of the shuttle ship. The drive had worked, sending the ship out and bringing it back, and only alien interference had prevented man from developing a drive that would have opened the galaxy to him. There was much speculation as the two ships blinked out toward the Orion Arm, and there were a few tentative conclusions. One, there seemed to be a relatively small number of them. During Plank's own travels before he'd found his way back to the solar system by tracking the signals of Heath's blinks, he had minutely examined a sizable portion of the Orion Arm. Then, while following the signal beam to the core of the galaxy, they had covered another considerable area. They were now in a part of space that was new to them, and after blinking thousands of light-years, they had still had no encounter with them. Of course, the galaxy was an enormous place and the likelihood of a chance encounter was small, even if the aliens numbered in the billions
and were flying all over space. Still, it seemed likely that they would be few in number. Otherwise, if a swarming civilization had been conducting a search for man's home, they would have found it. Plank, himself, would have eventually discovered the solar system merely by systematically covering every star in the arm as he worked his way outward. It might have taken him 1,000 years; but a civilization that could produce the technology represented by the two ships, the planet of the empty tinker-toys and the medical techniques that allowed Plank's brain to live indefinitely as the guiding force of a starship would have been around for a long time. Perhaps, Hara suggested, they were not vitally interested in finding man, but merely in checking him now and then by lifting some of his ships. The idea of being checked on by alien intelligence was not new. But it was no more welcome to Plank than it had been to intelligent people in the days of flying saucers, when it was widely believed that alien spaceships made regular check flights over the Earth and even went so far as to pick up humans for examination. «I don't think there's anything systematic about it,» Plank said. «There's a certain randomness about the entire thing. We've studied the time intervals between ship disappearances. There's no pattern. We're quite sure now that the ships are discovered by reading the tiny disturbances in the continuum. We know the blink generator sends a signal ahead of itself and that such a signal can be read from vast distances. It stands to reason that the hydro-powered ships also made some sort of disturbance when, at turnaround, they built power suddenly to decelerate. The fact that all of the blink test vehicles disappeared shows that they send a much stronger signal, while the signal sent by the hydro ships must be weak and erratic, otherwise there might have been a 100 percent disappearance of the conventional ships, just as there was in the blink ships.» «What worries me is that we send such a signal each time we blink,» Hara said. «That's another reason why I feel there is a certain unexplained randomness about this whole thing,» Plank said. «There's almost an indifference on their part. Certainly, from almost anywhere in the galaxy, they can read our blinks. They know where we've been, and they probably can figure out where we're going. Yet they make no contact.» «Perhaps we're not really important enough to demand much of their time,» Heath said. «It's scary,» Hara said. «But you know, there are nuts on Earth who could make a new religion of this. They'd build blink ships and go off inviting them to seize the ship, praying and singing all the while, waiting to be taken by these godlike creatures with such fantastic powers to a better place.» «It would be nice to believe that,» Plank said. «There's such a casual disregard of the human individuals involved. Take Webb. He just vanished. Take my case. I wasn't asked if I wanted to be disembodied. I wasn't asked if I wanted to live, perhaps for thousands of years, without the niceties of human existence.» He was in his mobile form. It seemed to make the other two feel more comfortable. He looked at Hara. It was not exactly what he was thinking when he said, «No one asked me if I wanted to exist for a long period of time without even being able to eat a steak.» «To pursue Hara's thought, although I don't think any of us really believe it, perhaps they saved your life,» Heath said. «Perhaps they were doing a nice thing for you by giving you a form of life after your body was seriously harmed or destroyed.» «If so,» Plank said, «then they were the agent of my body's harm. They were the ones who seized my ship.» «Do you think there could be dozens, hundreds of ships like yours, with the brains of space people encased?» Hara asked. «The list of the missing numbers in the hundreds,» Heath said. «It's possible,» said Plank. «What we're trying to do,» Hara went on, «is understand the thinking of alien beings. It's rather futile to wonder what someone else is thinking, especially when that someone may be very, very different.» «Just how different is illustrated by that tinker-toy planet back there,» Plank said. «We know from it, and from the ships, that nothing is done with hands. It's all done mentally. In my case, I actually flow into a
mechanical thing through its electric wiring. Is that the way they do it? Or do they do it with pure mental force? Along the same line, the message beams can be nothing but mental force. They travel on no physical wavelength. They travel infinite distances with no time lapse.» «A race with powerful extrasensory ability. Telepathic,» Heath said. «And what else?» «Beings that exist as powerful force fields?» Plank asked. «All around us? Laughing at us?» «No need for hardware, then,» Hara said. «Toys?» Plank asked. «Some of the constructions on the tinker-toy planet had, I swear, no practical purpose.» «As we know practical purpose,» Heath said. «There was an accelerator. It was recognizable. Now we know they're good on subatomics. In effect, they do the old alchemist's magic, transmuting one element into another. Now you'll have to admit that this is an accomplishment of some value, so why waste the materials on constructions that begin nowhere and end nowhere? A culture that uses an accelerator should be rather practical. The inconsistencies of that planet bother me.» «I think the worst thing of all is that we've always wondered if we were alone in the universe, so we've made attempts to contact others. We used to have huge observatories dedicated to alien contact. We wanted so desperately to find someone out there to whom we could say, hey, we are and you are, how about that?» She paused for a moment before going on. «I remember reading that on the first unmanned probe launched on a path that would take it outside the solar system, they put a stylized drawing of a man and woman and a simple star chart for locating old Sol in relationship to nearby pointer stars. I thought it was a very touching, very human thing, but futile, since the little probe was traveling at a snail's pace and probably won't reach the vicinity of another star for
hundreds of years yet, if it's still out there. But we were so alone. And now that we know we're not alone, I'm not sure I didn't like it best the other way.» «This is interesting,» Plank said, having completed another blink while Hara was talking. «Take a look.» He flashed a chart onto a screen. «Here we are.» He illustrated their position with a blip of light. «And here is where I first became aware that I was no longer a man, but a brain inside a machine.» Behind the blip of light indicating the ship, a zigzagging line extended back into the heart of the galaxy. An extension of that line pointed toward the planet he called Plank's World. «As I told you, it was the only world supporting a considerable amount of life. The slug things, remember?» «It couldn't be them,» Hara said. «No,» Plank agreed. «But that seems to be where we're headed.» «They seemed interested in having you search out life-zone planets,»
Heath said. «Now they're there, if we're right in believing that the relayed signals are going to them.» «Why would they be there?» Hara mused. «There are several possibilities,» Plank said. «To help. To observe. To harm.» He left his mobile extension inert. «And whatever the reason, we're going to be ready.» «To do what?» Heath asked. «To talk, to question. I hope that's all,» Plank said. «But if not, then we have enough fire power on these two ships to pulverize the planet.» He approached the planet at sublight speed. All eyes, all ears on the alert. He had transfered Hara and Heath to the dark ship since it was more heavily armored. He left the dark ship dead in space, keeping contact, while easing the Pride closer. The dark ship was always in his view, under constant monitoring. At first hint of trouble he would blink it out of there to a predetermined safe distance. He was certain he was being observed. It did not stand to reason that they, being so advanced, could be surprised. At any moment he expected contact, so he kept the communications bank aboard the dark ship open. It was reasonable to believe that they would have their weapons, at least as powerful as the weapons aboard the ships, perhaps weapons he could not even imagine. What was the power of a being who could manipulate atomic subparticles at will? Once again, he felt futility. The first man to take up spear and rock and go after the tiger must have had the same feeling. And, because he shared a common humanity with that first hunter, he pressed on. When a tiger begins to pick off your fellow villagers one by one, you take arms and go after him. You know that if you are not quick, not smart, you, too, will be tiger bait, yet you press ahead. That's the way man is. Otherwise, back on
Earth, the jungles might be still full of tigers, hip deep in them, with man a small, frightened thing running for his life and hiding in holes in the ground. The planet looked deceptively peaceful. A water and oxygen world is beautiful from space. Blues and the cover of clouds, a large storm system in the southern hemisphere. Winter in the northern temperate zone. He boarded the scout in his mobile form and blinked to within the atmosphere to begin his sweeps. He had selected the largest landmass, the one that had been populated most densely by the small, sluglike creatures—the planet's dominant form of life. Moving at low altitudes, slightly higher than 1,500 meters, he scanned the ground. The first thing that came to his attention was the total absence of the little animals. Where there had been millions, there were none. He lowered, slowed his speed. A dozen instruments found and analyzed a new substance, piled
and strewn, a reeking, oily, glutinous mass. It was in evidence all over the landscape. He did not take time to collect a sample. He returned to his high speed survey. Hours later, he was convinced that the largest landmass was not only devoid of animal life, but was empty of the presence of any alien visible to his detection instruments. Reporting his findings to the others aboard the dark ship, he flashed across an ocean to the second continental landmass. The findings were the same. Scattered islands and two subcontinental masses were yet to be searched. He chose to cover the larger area first. Once again he found that
the little slugs were no longer in evidence, only great accumulations of that glutinous material he had observed on both major landmasses. He had confined his search to daylight areas, adjusting his flight plan
to the planet's rotation. There was left only the ocean islands, some rather extensive chains in the southern oceans. He approached one of the larger islands from the sea, flying low and fast, lifting the scout over the escarpment and reading the findings of his instruments as they scanned
the hills and valleys of the interior of the island. At first, he received no life signals near the coast. Then, inland, he began to get scattered blips revealing the presence of the slugs. And, lifting over the peak of the dead volcano at the center and looking down into a small, beautiful, forested
valley, he saw his instruments leap wildly. Below him was a life-force of an astounding intensity. He slowed. He saw the thing in a jungle clearing. Its pale hump of a back towered above the tall trees surrounding it. Its bulk was, he estimated, in the hundreds of metric tons. Hovering over it, he had microseconds to assess and record. Later, when he had time to look at the visuals, he could not believe that his first instantaneous impressions had been so vividly correct. The form of the creature was a blobby globe. At the front of the globe, a huge maw as wide as the bulk and lined with hundreds of small, sharp teeth. Two armlike appendages extended forward from beside the maw; they were occupied with gathering and scooping up dozens of the slug animals, which had been herded into the clearing. The small animals waited patiently to be captured and then, unresisting, they allowed themselves to be shoveled into the maw. And behind the maw, in the hump of the globular body, huge muscles writhed with a swallowing motion. Behind the engorged belly at the rearmost extension, excrement was training out in a sort of obscene tail, even as the creature ate. In that instant, intent on destruction. Plank readied the small weapons
aboard the scout. But fast as his electronic reflexes were, the creature was faster. A vast mental roar filled his mind, paralyzed him for that microsecond in which the creature below continued to exist. Then there was quiet. Below him in the clearing, the remaining slug creatures began to nibble foliage. The only evidence of the monster was a reeking pile of the glutinous substance covering large areas of the landmasses of the planet. The thing was gone. Instantly, Plank blinked the scout out into the space between the planet and its sun where the dark ship with Hara and Heath waited. He came out into normal space within 100 meters of the ship, just in time to see it begin to break into colorful planes and disintegrate. Although the loss was a pain in his non-existent heart, he acted instantly, blinking toward the Pride. He boarded and checked. He was alone. The ship was intact. Hara was gone. He had insisted on tracking the tiger and the beast had consumed, not the hunter, but the one most dear to him. Plank screamed into the emptiness of the ship. It was a hoarse whisper of a scream, emerging from his non-existent, fume-scarred throat. It was a sound of desperation, of pain, of mortal agony. And then it was silent. He took but a few seconds to decide his course. Below him, the planet that once had teemed with life was barren. Only a few of the small animals remained on scattered islands. They had come, led to the planet by his instruments. He had surprised one of them and he had failed. He had been too slow to take advantage of the surprise, but if he ever had another chance, he'd be faster. He longed to have Hara near, to be able to tell her, look, we have at least some answers. They are the thing of a nightmare, not some benevolent superior form of life. They had me find that planet to provide them with a meal. And the flesh of those slug animals is surprisingly similar to the flesh of those on… Earth. Was it next? So the choice was whether or not to blink directly home. All this passed through his mind in a few seconds, before the message came. He had no communicator on the Pride, but he heard/felt the words. Plank, said the voice in his head, you were naughty. You interrupted us during our favorite game. For that you should be punished, but since you were good and faithful in bringing us the others, we will forgive, even as we enjoy. Pushing the power to the limit, using the longest blinks possible, Plank flashed through space. His destination was not Earth. The voice of the
tiger was in his ears and he knew, instinctively, the point of origin of that voice. He was sure, as sure as he'd ever been of anything, that he'd meet his tiger again on the tinker-toy planet. CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Pride's memory banks held the coordinates for the route back to the tinker-toy planet, but the trip was still time consuming. Plank would not allow himself to think that he might arrive too late. He found it difficult to believe that a race that could create near miracles could be represented by the thing he'd seen on Plank's World. Nor could he accept the evidence which told him that the super-being, that thing of maw and belly and teeth, had emptied a planet of life in a period of weeks. A horror was there that was almost comical. The plot, he told himself, wouldn't even be acceptable for a kiddies' horror show back home. The monster that ate the world. Indeed. And yet a monster had eaten a world. A sane man just cannot believe that a being who considers man a mere meal exists in the galaxy. But how else to explain? There was the suggestion, made in the endless hours of speculation during the trip to Plank's World, that the other victims of the disappearances had, like Plank, been integrated into ships. Which, to Plank's mind, was only the least of several evils. Hara a starship? For the first time he allowed himself to assess his own situation. Since his awakening inside the new Plank's Pride, he had been able to forestall such self-examination because he'd been busy. He had had purpose. Foremost in his mind was the overwhelming urge to find home. Then the vital business of trying to discover a few whys, a time made tense and desperate by the implied threat to his race. Now, as he waited through the brief periods of recharging at the end of each blink, he pondered. Was it all bad, this being disembodied? He was never hungry. He suffered no pain, not even minor headaches or muscle soreness. And out there was a universe waiting to be explored. Under certain circumstances, he reasoned, his state could even be considered desirable. He entertained thoughts of the Pride and another ship, which would be Hara, blinking into endless distances side by side to unravel the age-old questions. But that was far too platonic. He was, after all, a man. He had loved Hara as a man loves a woman and had looked forward to a normal lifetime with her. He could, even as a disembodied brain, know desire.