"Ours is the power," the voice said, "of life and of death."
He wanted desperately to convince himself that it was all part of the same colossal fake—that it was simply one of the most fabulous illusions ever devised behind which to direct a system or galaxy-wide bootlegging net. It had to be that.
It had to be, he realized with uncomfortable suddenness, because if it were not, it represented a science which had no regard for the laws that impeded men; one that had risen to far greater heights than that of which men boasted so proudly. And that of course could not be. It was that knowledge alone which had made life worth the living for centuries. Perhaps, when she had refused to speak of what she had seen, Lin Griffin had been wiser than he thought. But she had said—
Cragin felt himself becoming sickeningly mixed up.
And whether he wanted to believe his own senses or not, he knew that here was no phony, no fake, no illusion. Realizing it hurt like hell.
The cockiness was gone from his voice; he tried, but he couldn't keep it as he spoke.
"You are one of the Owners?" The girl said nothing. Her face was white, yet Cragin did not think her confidence was gone, just shaken for the moment. She had seen the hand of what seemed to be a man hurl a solar system to instantaneous destruction at will.
"I am not," the voice said. "I serve. I am of the second rank, as are all of my race, in the service of the Owners."
"You are here alone?"
The hand touched another stud, and a smaller screen wavered into luminescence. Cragin saw a fleet of spaceships, hovering in a geometrically perfect formation, any one ship of which would have been, by itself, capable of searing to dust the entire Stellar Patrol in a single, brief engagement. The formation of sleek juggernauts extended as far as the eye could see. It was like looking into two opposed mirrors.
"My guard," the voice said. "Manned by a race of the third rank."
"I think I get it. The Owners sit home and quietly rule the universe while somebody else does the—" Cragin cut himself off. It was the wrong track entirely. It must be done differently. "The woman and I," he said evenly, "would be willing servants."
For the briefest moment there was silence, save for the muffled gasp that Cragin heard at his shoulder. But the girl said nothing.
Cragin watched as the hand of the red-mailed figure grazed other banks of relays. In quick succession all telescreens went dark.
"On each screen," the voice said, "you have seen a complete system of planets. In this control point there are exactly three hundred screens. Throughout the Owners' domain there are perhaps slightly less than a full billion of such control points as these. And there have seldom been any which have not been so well concealed, in suitable relationship to the intelligence level of that system-group controlled, as to have yielded to discovery."
"You have not answered my proposal," Cragin retorted. "You're as aware as I am of what's going on in my mind or you wouldn't bother with all the gory details. You know we could serve, even on the—the 97th rank or so...."
"Proceed."
"Don't try to cover up your own slip. You talk slow, but you get a little ahead of yourself. This outfit is supposed to be cached away with such cleverness that an Earth-mind wouldn't be up to locating it. Only we did. We're not as dumb as we look, even to you. Your record would get a little smeared up if you did away with a couple of potential servants. The wheels might not like that. Tell me I'm wrong."
"You think quickly. You dare to offer a proposition to an emissary of the Owners."
"It's no proposition, it's a statement of fact."
Cragin could feel the sweat behind his ears start to roll down his neck, and his clothes were beginning to stick to his back again. But he had been in jams before. When you couldn't shoot, you had to talk. About anything that came into your head, but you had to talk.
"Servants of the second rank do not err, Earthman. Upon reexamining my logic, I find it sound. Yet in the process of carrying it to its ultimate, I conclude that inasmuch as the mathematical possibility exists that you are capable of being tested successfully for a servant of the menial ranks, a final decision warrants the deferment of your destruction pending administration of such examination."
"You mean we live."
"Failure to qualify as a servant will mean your destruction."
There was near hysteria in Lin Griffin's voice as it broke the spell Cragin's argument had created.
"Cragin, you can't realize what you're doing! You're selling us into sl—"
"Service, Lin Griffin," he cut her off. He knew he was bruising her arm with the quick pressure of his fingers. "Service to the Owners."
"Then follow me," the voice said.
IV
Cragin had little idea of how long they had flown, and none of the number of continua through which they had warped. They had been allowed to sleep, and upon awakening, had received food. That they were under guard was only to be sensed.
"They can afford to take us for granted," he muttered. He felt for the butts of his guns; they were still at his hips.
"Don't—" the girl said.
"Don't give it a second thought. I know when I've had it, and they know I do."
"You're convinced, then."
Cragin looked about the confines of the small metal cubicle in which they had been quartered as though trying to see through its walls for another glimpse of one of the flagship's crew. The servants of grade three were as unlike men as their cloaked captor had been similar. But not less incredible than other creatures he had seen. Only—intelligent. That, if nothing more. Cragin mused with a grimace.
"I could use a different word, kid, but it would come to the same thing. If IQ meant the social register around here, even the snottiest ancestors either of us ever had would look like only moderately successful bums. They got us where the gray matter's short. Of that I am convinced."
"They didn't have to fight very hard. Or should I be thanking you for my life?"
"Up to you. I'm just stalling for what we can get out of it. Who wants to die? Oh, I forgot—"
She turned away from him, and he fiddled with the controls of a small built-in telescreen. It was simple enough and he got it working easily, but it showed nothing. Just blackness. He left it on.
"You're thoroughly convinced of everything he told us, aren't you?" she asked at last.
"From a purely logical standpoint, what else—"
"Purely logical! For a little while I thought there was a chance that—that you weren't like all the rest."
"All what rest? I don't get your range, kid," Cragin answered.
"First you thought they were fakes—"
"At first that was logical, too. But old cloak-and-ray-gun there proved pretty damn conclusively that the crowd he works for are the bosses, the big bosses. That's what gets me."
"And it's the real reason, isn't it, that you wanted to call them fakes? Couldn't bear the idea of the precious culture of Earth taking a back seat to anything."
"That sounds good, coming from one of our top-notch scientists. The daughter and pupil of Fowler Griffin. One of our most respected...."
"Did you think we weren't human? Are scientists something to be worshipped?"
Cragin looked at her for a long, steady moment. He was mixed up again, and she was doing it.
"Without our science, Miss Griffin, we'd've all died five hundred years ago. Maybe that's why it takes top rating back home. What our men of science say we can do, we do—what they say we can't, we know we can't. It's that simple, only I don't see why I'm telling you this. For five centuries men have known from the day they could talk what their lives would be from that day to their deaths, and from one end of the universe their forbears had mastered to the other. It's all mapped out. It has to be, because the scientists tell us—they draw the maps. We follow them."
The girl was silent then for a long time, and Cragin fell to wondering exactly what she was getting at. Or maybe—maybe it was just the strain, or the shock of realizing that there were scientists who were of greater stature than Earth's, and it was they who truly ruled.
But the girl still had him mixed up.
There was a sudden gasp from her and he turned his head. The blackness in the telescreen had suddenly become punctured with white-hot, burning dots of light. Dots of light, perfectly aligned, in long, straight rows—a gateway! A gateway of stars, forged by the hands of those who owned all Space and Time, put into position to notify the entire cosmos that here for all who might seek it was the entrance to the home of the Owners!
For a moment Cragin could say nothing. He had seen their cloaked captor give a demonstration of raw power. And here was its counterpart at the other end of the ultimate in mastery—unvarnished, positive control.
They owned a universe, and were its architects as well.
"Ten million miles wide!" the girl breathed.
"A light-year long if it's a foot," Cragin said in a low voice. "And at the end—"
They watched as the pattern shifted; the dots grew larger until they were coruscating balls of white flame. And then, with a majestic slowness, the entrance to the gateway became a static, unchanging picture of unprecedented geometric symmetry.
"It's—we've stopped," the girl said.
"Cut our gun, that's all. Probably waiting for clearance to enter. The whole damn fleet of us."
"It's—it's pompous ridiculousness!" Her voice was edged with frustrated anger and it mounted as she spoke. "A gateway, a show-piece—a stupid affectation of the ultimate in egocentricity! With or without their little pathway, there's all of Space from which to make an approach—"
"I doubt it, princess. Outside this little welcome-mat I'll bet my pilot's papers there's a destructive field of some kind that'd blast the dye out of your hair at ten light-years. One gets you a thousand that this is the only way you get to see the top brass. And you don't do that without an O.K. from a big somebody."
The minute hand on Cragin's wristchron made seven complete circuits before the gateway again began expanding to receive them on the telescreen.
And then they were past its opening, and hurtling headlong down its great length at what Cragin knew must be a speed which, although no longer requiring flight by comptometer, would have taxed his skill to the utmost.
He and the girl watched the telescreen in silence for minutes, watching the pin-points of light on either side grow from minute flecks in the blackness to great spheres of flame within so many seconds, and then pass....
"Look!"
"Yeah, it's a great show. But—hell! It couldn't be a—"
The scintillating point of light which lie dead ahead, in the exact center of the gateway and at its extreme end, could not, Cragin realized, be a planet. Unless it were a perfectly polished reflector, it could not show so much like the miniature stars at either side.
It was a star, itself.
"It must be just illusion," he said evenly. "It's got to be."
"Oh no," Lin Griffin said. "Of course they live in the center of a star! They rule all, don't they? They're the great masters of all creation, aren't they? Certainly you don't think your great masters would live on anything so simple as a mere planet! But of course they live where the temperature is only several billion degrees—"
She began laughing and Cragin slapped her across the face.
"Cut it, kid, CUT IT!"
There were tears coming from her eyes and her face remained in the twisted contortions of hysteria even after her voice had become soundless.
She pulled away, and Cragin left her to herself. In a little while she began to cry and he could hear her sobbing above the even hum of the telescreen, but he left her alone.
And he knew one thing. Ithadto be illusion. Damn it, Owners or not, no matter what the hell they were, it had to be illusion!
Cragin had never felt shaken through to the inside of him before. Fear and awe had been banished from the minds of men for five centuries. Yet he felt as though he were staggering blindly, and he knew he was helpless.
The pin-point had become a searing, blinding thing, and even as he shielded his eyes, it filled the screen. They were going into it.
Into it.
Into a live star.
No, was the only word he could think. No.
NO!
He spun away, wrenching the telescreen off as he did so.
But nothing changed, and he did not die. Somehow, there was no change at all.
He sat upright, rigid, as though self-hypnotized for what could have been hours or minutes. And there was no change, no awful, searing wave of white heat, no last instant of torture before death.
Simply, suddenly, a light jar.
And Cragin wondered sardonically if his small rectangular bit of enamelite would be at all impressive on the planet the Owners called home.
Neither Cragin nor the girl ever saw the planet as such. And it was a planet, Cragin learned, a planet little larger than Earth, honeycombed with subterranean tubes and chambers as had been the control point; a labyrinth which contained a civilization of little more than twenty million members; a headquarters for those who ran and owned the universe.
They were escorted to the testing place by two creatures of the fourth grade; bipeds, shorter than men, with hunched backs and splayed tentacles for arms and hands. Cragin noted that they carried armament of a sort; simple tube-like objects which were aimed at him while he was relieved of his Krells.
Then he and Lin Griffin were placed in a bullet-shaped vehicle, one of the guards operating its controls and the other stationing himself behind them.
Cragin was not prepared for the girl's sudden outburst and jerked his hands vainly at the empty holsters at his hips.
"Of course we can escape from these simpletons!" she cried. "We can easily overpower these dimwitted brutes—"
There was no reaction from their guards; Cragin's hands relaxed slowly.
"What—"
"Don't you understand? They're fourth grade—two less than our cloaked friend. They are our guards, so of course our superiors in intelligence, but still not on a high enough plane to interpret the emanations of pure thought as he was."
"You'll do, I guess. But I've still got a feeling that if either of us twitches an eyebrow—"
She continued as though he had not spoken. "He took your guns; we're now held prisoner under weapons. They have to rely on material means of power. Look, Cragin!"
Highly-polished curved metal walls of an alloy comprised of ores that he could not begin to identify flashed past at such speed that all sensation of motion was negated. There was no sound.
"I'm looking."
"It's a safe bet the tests will be something devised by the Owners themselves. Something that will measure our total thought potential—something based on an extremely advanced function of psychometrics."
"You're over my head again."
"If we're acceptable, Cragin, we're established in one grade or another—and will be constantly under the supervision of creatures of the next highest grade—that's the way it's been working so far, with the exception of the little excursion we're taking now."
"In other words—"
"In other words, we've got to think in the simplest patterns possible. Childish things. Anything that will belie our true intelligence level. What's your I.Q.?"
"I didn't ask you how old you were, duchess, but I test out at an embarrassed 158 or so."
"We match within ten points. It'll have to do. Because we've got to fake—test out at about 115."
"Like I say, you'll do. Testing out at 115, our bosses on the next level shouldn't be a shred above 130 or so. So—"
"So we've got them by almost a 30-point margin. We'll be in a position to out-think our immediate guards, and perhaps even those over them. It's our only hope."
"Mental imposters.... You just forgot one little item, honey."
"Oh of course. They're the masters of all, so there's no possibility that a mere human—"
"Take it easy. I didn't say it's no go. Just wondering if 115's are acceptable. If not, you know what happens. We go to the bottom of the class never to rise again. Maybe even 160's aren't eligible. Remember, the control points are hidden relative to the mental ability of the civilizations whose planets they control. Only people who exceed the Owners' estimate—"
"If they control our system, they control billions of others—we were told that. Some higher, some certainly lower. And we did discover the point."
"You and your father. I never would have."
"Look, Cragin. It's the only chance there is. But if I fake and you don't—"
"Yeah. You think it'll work?"
"I don't know."
"But you'd rather die, that it, than be a knowing slave to another civilization, even though it is undisputed master of—"
"That's why I'd rather die, Cragin! Because they're false masters!"
He didn't reply. She was confusing him again, and perhaps the basic reason for the confusion was that he didn't understand why she mixed him up. If there was anything Earth's culture stood for, it was the integrity of the fact—maturation and development of the individual through strict adherence to the known. Only the proven fact was worthy of belief and acceptable as a basis for thought. Nothing else.
But the girl wasn't behaving that way.
"All right. We gamble that an IQ of 115 is acceptable. Then we gamble that we can effect a break. In other words we just take a chance on a chance; make a really long shot out of it."
"Will you, Cragin?"
He laughed a little. Hell, sooner or later, anyway—
"Hand me my rattle," he said. "I better practice. The asteroids are falling down, falling down; the asteroids are falling down, my fair lady...."
V
The panels to two adjacent chambers were open.
"Guess they don't trust us together," Cragin said. The dark blue plastiglass of his Patrol tunic dully reflected the subdued half-light that emanated into the tube-like corridor from beyond the panels. Like a nightmare, he kept telling himself, like a nightmare. Impossible impossible impossible....
Her face was the color of white sand, and it was the only indication that she understood.
"Please try, Cragin."
"Sure."
"You want to try...."
"It's a cinch I can't arrest 'em, princess. And I know you want out. You want to sink 'em all and so do I. If there's any way, believe me—"
Cragin knew he would not forget the look etched in the thin white lines of her face as she was led into the testing place; there was something in it that he had never seen before in the face of an Earthman. Not an expression caused purely by reflex in time of danger or pain; not one carefully controlled after finding an unpleasant solution to an inescapable problem. Neither of those. But what others....
Cragin looked then to what he might be more successful in understanding. The testing place which had been readied for him was a small, independent laboratory, much like the control room of the machine-planet, save for the complete absence of telescreens. And awaiting him were two cloaked figures in red mail—technicians, second grade. The Owners were taking no chances.
He lay at full length on a sheet of metal that was as comfortably resilient and warm as an old-fashioned bed of feathers, and waited expectantly.
"Are you prepared, Earthman?"
"Fire away, braintrust." He wondered at the absence of equipment. Nothing was attached to him—no electrodes, none of the usual electroencephalographic devices. There was only a low hum, and the pale glow from the indistinct walls about him.
"The test begins, Earthman. Display your mind as you see fit."
The hum deepened. The walls became more indistinct, and the glow somehow became a part of the sound that filled the tiny chamber.
Cragin flashed his mind to his first years of schooling. He had been 10 years old, had learned the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two opposite sides ... "i" represents the square root of the quantity minus one, and is termed an imaginary number ... for every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction....
He lost all sense of time, and guarded against thinking of it, lest he betray even a basic knowledge of continuum dynamics. Had to keep it simple, child-like, simple.... The intensity of light diminishes inversely as the distance from its source is squared.
The voice inside his head was at length the signal that the test was completed.
"From this examination, Earthman, it is evident that you stumbled where you did purely by accident, and that the craft in which you traveled was out of control, operating entirely beyond your understanding."
Cragin kept his thoughts diffuse and made no effort to reply.
"Do I serve or die?" he asked at length.
"On a probationary basis, you serve. Grade, twelfth."
The test was done, and Cragin had won the first cast of the dice.
The ruse had worked, Cragin knew, not because the Owners and their test had been outwitted but because the test itself had been logically constructed to measure the level of a mind which was functioning at its maximum. The trick was based on folly—folly in which higher level intelligences would not indulge, and which lower ones would not recognize as a gamble for higher stakes than slavery. Cragin knew he would not have indulged in it had the chance been up to him alone.
What surprised him of course was that so far it had worked. And it made Lin Griffin all the more mystifying, almost inscrutable. Theoretically, she should have dismissed such a plan as ridiculous. But logic and the theory upon which it was based, and what Lin Griffin did, were two different things. Cragin tried to put the puzzle from his mind. And the girl. The probabilities were against his seeing her again. And that, for reasons as puzzling as the girl herself, made him peculiarly miserable.
Other slaves from a hundred other civilizations, ranging from the shape of a man to shapes that Cragin could not identify with his three dimensional senses had been packed into the hull of the spacecraft with him; they were all of his assigned grade, and therefore would constitute little problem. He could tell by their reactions to outside stimuli that he was their mental superior.
The pilot might be a different matter. He carried arms much resembling his own Krell guns, judging from their outward appearance of construction and functional design. But there was one thing—they had a fixed grip, like the ancient pistols of Earth. It meant they could be used from only one hold, and indicated that they were copied from the product of a civilization perhaps a hundred years behind his own. But perhaps his slim margin of advantage would be enough.
A cloaked and red-mailed servant of the second grade had briefly addressed the group prior to take-off, and for moments Cragin had feared that he would accompany the consignment. But he had not.
The voice had simply said, "New servants of the Owners, you are about to be transported to your place of work. As servants of the twelfth, and lowest, rank, your duty will be the mining of unconsumed zronon, employed by the Owners to maintain their home and their glorious gateway on an equal level of brilliance to that of the stars themselves. Death awaits that servant who lags in his output. Your destination will be the eighth mining planet, nearest the edge of the Trespass Limit. It was once, like all other mining planets, a live star, extinguished and cooled by the Owners that its highly precious and combustible substance be turned to their own desired ends.
"Are there any for whom this directive has not been reduced to sufficiently simple terms?"
There was silence.
"Very well. Be it remembered among each of you that the Owners, those who near the goal of the creation of life, and who are long since the masters of death, command you."
Then it was over, and Cragin waited in the hot, dank hull, sweating inside his helmet, in which there was an endless supply of his own unique atmosphere. His own helmet, because it was far from being so perfect, had been taken from him upon completion of the test. Such was the case with each of the others, and the textures and colorations of the stuff they breathed or absorbed was as varied as the planets on which they were spawned. And there was hardly any helmet of the same shape or design as another.
The waiting did not last long, but Cragin's plan was in his head as completely as he could fashion it when he felt the landing jar. If it were to work, it would be executed with split-second speed and precision, or again, the alternative would be destruction. It was evident that to use his advantage to the utmost, it must be coupled with the dual advantages of immediacy and surprise.
The airlock opened; with the rest, Cragin filed through it. He took glancing note of the positions of the few guards; kept their pattern of surveillance stenciled in his memory.
The file was split—a quick maneuver placed him at the end of his own section as it was led to the opening of a shaft even darker than the leaden twilight which hung low like a weighted shroud over the entire sphere.
It would be in a moment, or a month, or a year....
The slave ship had not prepared yet for take-off; its tubes smoked lazily, cooling.
A month, even a day, would be too long. If it was to be attempted at all, it was to be NOW.
And Cragin had the squat guard on a grip which broke his spine before his heart had time to beat again. The gloom helped; the din that issued dully from the mine's lower levels covered the near silence of the death which Cragin had meted out. The weapon was the guard's only insigne of identity, and Cragin had it cradled in his own arms before the thick, broken body hit the ground.
Then he ran, laboring against a slightly stiffer gravity than his Earth-muscles had been born to, waving the weapon above him with all the strength he had!
Toward the ship and its smoking tubes—gesturing, pointing toward the cave-mouth, and yelling his head off, wondering how closely the time-lapse would match between the time he reached the ship and the other guards, even now running their first steps toward the cave mouth toward which he pointed, would realize that although he was giving alarm, he was running away from, not toward, the indicated trouble point.
He was within the airlock by the time the first guard to answer his cry of distress had taken twenty running steps, and had, upon taking the twenty-first, realized that Cragin was going in the wrong direction. But the margin had been enough—
The lock slammed shut.
The pilot, returning to his control panels from the brief recess he had taken elsewhere in the ship, only saw Cragin for as long as it took the Earthman to unleash the weapon he had captured. There was a flat explosion, the weapon bucked uncomfortably, and the pilot died with a large, blue hole through what Cragin took to be his head.
There was only one more thing left to logic, and the rest—
For the second time in his life since he had met Lin Griffin, he wondered what, if something there was, might lie beyond logic.
The simplified control panel resembled something that might have been manufactured in Earth factories half a century before. It had been obviously designed for the capabilities of the servant-pilot to whom it was assigned. If only she had the guts—
Cragin blasted off, and twisted the speed-control full on.
The Trespass Limit would shatter him, of course. Or within moments at least, the death which the Owners themselves controlled would seek him out. Unless....
He could not understand the symbols, but he knew the acceleration and velocity needles were going crazy—they were deep in a red-hued band and nearing its limit.
Even through the inverse inertia field, Cragin could feel the thrust of the terrible acceleration and then—
There was a click.
A hum which rose within seconds to a high shrill followed it and then another click came, another hum, then going up the scale.
Such sounds could be only from—COMPTOMETERS!
Cragin spun a telescreen control, a mad laughter welling from within him, bursting through his blood-flecked lips, shaking him uncontrollably. There was blackness! The gateway, gone—the great, star-like home of the Owners, vanished! Somehow, he was out!
A critical speed, and the comps going like crazy!
Cragin laughed and laughed until he fell unconscious.
VI
It had been, as closely as he could tell, nine years.
Nine years of aimless—no, helpless, wandering from planet to planet, from sun to sun, flying tight-rope between countless dimensions, following his fantastic escape from the realm of the Owners. He should feel excitement now; should want to laugh until he deafened himself because even now, swimming palely in the field of his forward electronoscope was the solar system, his system; HOME.
Luck, chance, whatever you wanted to call it, he was home. Stumbled on it, of course, as he had stumbled his entire way the length, depth and time of all creation. He should laugh, but there was no strength for laughter. There was just a tranquil kind of acceptance, a mould of thought into which Cragin had long since forced his mind, in order to retain his sanity as he ran the never ending gamut of change which was the very fabric of the infinity in which he had plodded.
Home.
A place of torture and of slow death, but at least a place where he might die among his own kind.
Had he not been barely minutes through the Barrier with the comptometers still warm, the insistent radar signal wouldn't have been worth its interruption of his thoughts.
But anything so close to the Barrier demanded at least cursory investigation. He flicked a radar panel relay to TRACK.
The object's speed was building up. It was without a doubt a controlled acceleration. No school kid could fail to recognize a comptometer-regulated trajectory. Within seconds his fingers were flicking across a three dimensional plot-check.
Headed for a Barrier-bust!
Cragin checked the comps back in, mentally replotting a new trajectory of his own for them to pick up as he did so. As his hurtling craft entered a sliding, almost too-closely cut parabolic reversement, he cut in his com-beam.
"This is Cragin, Stellar Patrol, please ack, whoever you are. You are heading for the Barrier. You must alter course. You have not more than three minutes. Acknowledge please if you read me."
He waited, wondering. There was no answer, just the emptiness of the void echoing hollowly to the eternal half-whisper of Infinity.
But—the track altered! The ship was slowing, curving off! Forty seconds went by, and it had gone into an oblique drift.
For the first time in nine years there was a sweaty feeling in the palms of his hands, in the stubble of his upper lip. He cut his comps out, hauled his ship into a paralleling trajectory, then angled a gradual interception path.
"This is Cragin," he repeated. His voice felt husky as though he had not used it for a century. "I am friendly. I intend no trouble. It is for your safety that I request permission to board you. Have information essential to your flight...."
There was no ack. He had his space-helmet dogged tight as he slid alongside the slender, dark-hued craft whose jets had been choked to the lazy, red-hued combustion of idling speed, and reached for his Krells. He hesitated, let them remain hanging on the bulkhead. He had said he was coming as a friend.
He flicked a single A-intensity magnetic tractor to the craft that seemed to float motionlessly beside his own, scrambled along it on his spacesuit's mag-unit, and was still perhaps five feet from the smooth side of the silent ship when an airlock growled open to receive him.
Once shut behind him, he tried to trace a million half-finished thoughts as the lock chamber cycled up to pressure.
Who was in here? Scientists who had long since learned the secret of the Barrier? Hardly, or his warning would have gone unheeded save for a polite acknowledgement. Who then—another explorer as Fowler Griffin had been? Or someone else who had stumbled onto the presence of the X Ecliptic and the machine-planet?
Or some alien flightmaster of some foreign universe who was either exploring or lost, as he had been lost....
A blue light flashed the intergalactic symbol for PRESSURE and the inner lock slid back.
The small control room was illuminated only with the soft wash of light emanating from the compact but complete instrument panel—an instrument panel at once strikingly similar to that of his own ship. A figure turned to meet him—
There were 40 years etched into a countenance that should have borne barely the hint of nine. The sag of the narrow shoulders told of the soul-breaking exhaustion that reflected dully from the sunken eyes more eloquently than the straight, bloodless mouth could ever have told. The gray lips were almost motionless as they parted.
"Hello, Cragin," Lin Griffin said.
"Greetings. My name is Randolph Cragin, Stellar Patrol. Your cooperation is appreciated, and was requested inasmuch as it is my duty to—to...."
The light was so uncertain, yet—there was something about the face. The forehead—deep within the eyes—
"Yes. Patrolman?"
"No," was all he could find to say. "No." He watched in an agonized disbelief as the suggestion of a smile mingled with the shadowed wrinkles of her ashen face.
"Even as yourself, Cragin, I—eluded them. It took this long, for a woman lacks the ready brute strength which so often turns impending defeat into quick victory. I am glad that you were successful, that you're alive. It was worth heeding your call to see you again."
"But I—I thought they. That is after I escaped they—their anger could have taken only one direction."
"It was not anger, precisely. Just—shall we say, a rather intensive increase in police efficiency? No, it was not anger. Mine was the anger. But now—" She hesitated, turned her eyes toward the instrument banks, then back to his. "Now I've got the high cards, Patrolman." There was a subtle change deep within the sunken eyes, as though a smoldering candle flame had suddenly become a tiny bit of polished steel glinting in the rays of a new sun at noon. "But this time, don't follow."
"I don't get it. Somehow you're still alive. But somehow—well, you—"
"Aged? Gotten old? Don't be afraid to say it. The vibrokey did most of it. Residuary effect. It has potentialities that I'm sure even father never dreamed of."
"Vibrokey? I don't—"
"Think back. Remember how I located the entrance to the machine planet, how I opened it? How I told you that father had said that it could shake whole buildings down? How I explained that it experiments with all possible combinations and magnitudes of vibration speeds and patterns until any assigned pattern is matched—"
Cragin scowled a little. Something stirred stealthily in his memory, and then the whole thing crept slowly back, piece by piece.
"You mean you slammed your way out with that gadget?"
"In a way. The one my father made was of course taken from me and destroyed. But I had helped him build it; I knew I could build another. But I had to steal what bits and pieces of materials I needed whenever it was possible. Sometimes I waited months for an opportunity, only to lose it at the last moment. Yet the waiting helped in its own way. Even as I slaved for them, Cragin, I thought. I figured, refigured. And when, after seven years, I had accumulated the few simple parts I needed, I knew I could build a better instrument than Fowler Griffin himself had."
"And you built it—"
"While the others slept and the guards ate. That took almost two years."
"Then?"
"I vibrated a guard into senility. He died of old age within seconds. In what simple uniform he wore and with his weapon, I bluffed my way aboard this ship in which we stand now. I had to kill a pilot and three crewmen before I was successful in tuning the key to a dimension existing in a completely different pattern of atomic vibrations. The transferal itself was instantaneous. Then on critical speeds I found my way back."
Cragin took a deep breath. "And you once told me I was impossible. But just the same I don't want to be kidded, even if you have got more circuits upstairs than I can ever be wired for. Remember I didn't pick you up goingtowardhome. The nose of this barrel was about to do a little Barrier-busting."
The faded smile returned to Lin Griffin's age-contorted face. She had not been completely immune to the device of her own making; even her brilliance had been unable to devise a vibration scheme which would resolve to zero the reaction effects of dimension transferal through alteration of atomic vibration patterns.
"I wanted to see Earth again, Cragin. I don't know if you understand that or not. Love is a common word, but few understand it.
"Our people, advanced in scientific knowledge and wisdom as they are, had long since forgotten it when we first met. It was seldom in their past that their faith was placed wholeheartedly in it. But they're my people just as they're yours, Cragin, and I love them because they are. And that's why I'm on my way to take over the machine-planet; to destroy it. To destroy it so that it can never be replaced."
"You aren't making sense, gal."
"I am, Cragin. Because Owners or no Owners, the Earth—the entire system and the universe in which it lives—have true physical and chemical values of their own—values determined in the very beginning by an entity far higher than they!"
"You mean you actually believe—"
"I do and I'm proud of it!"
Cragin felt his face grow warm, knew he reddened, was not sure why. He felt a strange compulsion to turn his eyes from hers. Mad? Easily said, of course, but—No.
No. Not mad at all.
"I may understand more than you think, Lin Griffin. I am human."
There was a moment's silence. Then, as though she had not heard him, she spoke rapidly.
"Once returned to the X Ecliptic, Cragin, I shall set the vibrokey adrift within its circumference, to set up a vibration field which will negate any form of other energy, including counter-vibrations, and which will mean complete destruction to any form of matter. I intend to activate the key from the machine-planet itself with nothing more complex than a simple radar beam, after I have restored the solar system to its original values."
"That'll mean everything within the Ecliptic will be destroyed; the machine-planet; you too. You're telling me you don't mean to come back. I can't let—"
It was as though she was totally deaf to each word he said.
"I don't believe in the Owners as masters of all, Patrolman, despite their extreme advances in the realm of both pure and applied science. You do. You do, because they symbolize the scientific ultimate.... But science was only ever meant to be a useful tool for men. Not their God."
Cragin felt funny inside.
"You'll die," he said like a child.
"But you shall not. You shall live. Such a thing," she said, "has been done before for the peoples of Earth.
"Now go, Cragin."
There was nothing else to do.
He paused. His wide shoulders sagged a little; he was not given to long talk, and he had discerned the signs of restlessness among a few of the impassive assemblage. Others were more kind. Little else, perhaps, could have been expected.
"As I confessed when I began," his quiet voice resumed, "I do not have many of the scientific answers you want. Hints that Lin Griffin gave me before her last trip beyond the Barrier—they are all I have to explain why the solar system is as you see it now; altered, changed, alive.
"Unless, gentlemen, you would accept a better answer; one that Lin Griffin herself might have given you. She would tell you that there is more to the Universe—the macrocosmo and the microcosmo as well—than Man has yet measured. To speak of Universe means, gentlemen, to speak not only of its known contents, but of its unknown as well, for it is eternally the container of both.
"Logically, I should have met death in my attempt at escape. Logically, no human woman could have endured what Lin Griffin endured, nor conceived the strategy with which the machine-planet was erased from existence. According to the logic of the last five centuries of human culture, what Lin Griffin did, how she thought, were both impossibilities.
"Yet Earth is green again.
"So when next you seek to plumb the Universe, gentlemen, and to equate yet one more of its myriad unknown quantities, think again of the half-gods, such as the Owners—such as we ourselves strove so mightily to be—who would equate them all. For it is always inevitable, gentlemen that soon or late, though the Universe remains, the half-gods go.
"There are some, I believe, who would seek too high an office. You—you may thank God, gentlemen, for the few who will not let them."
Then Cragin's voice at last fell silent, and silently, he stepped from the podium.
The time was five o'clock, Sunday, June 9, 3024, and from somewhere far off there was the gentle sound of a tolling bell.