Yrra's voice — or was it her thoughts? — hurt him with sorrow and longing. He was not so free as he had thought. And then he saw Taggart talking to a neat efficient pleasant-looking chap with eyes like two brown marbles, and he knew that it must be Frayne. He felt their thoughts, cold, quick, clear, perfectly ruthless. For the first time he understood what it was that set men like that apart from the bulk of the human race. Their minds were like cold wells into which no light or warmth ever penetrated. They might counterfeit friendship or even love, but the capacity for them was not really there. All the emotions were turned inward, bound tightly around the core of Self.
And these were the men who had beaten him, the men who were robbing the galaxy of its mightiest possession.
Harlow became aware that he could still feel hate.
He sprang at the men. He reached out to strike them, and the substance of his being passed through them like bright smoke. They were startled, but that was all. And Taggart smiled.
'Is that you, Harlow? I thought so. There are disadvantages in not having a body, aren't there?” He gestured toward the Converter. “You can have yours back any time. Just come through.'
'Well, then, you'll have to wait and hope that some day I'll get curious about your kind of life and come through where we can meet on equal ground. Though I wonder just what you could do to me even so.'
Dundonald was close beside Harlow now. “Come on, you can't do any good here. As he says, there are disadvantages.'
The fingers Harlow no longer itched for a weapon. “I'm not going back through.'
'They'll kill you the instant you return. You know that.'
'But if the two of us came together — if we came fast and went for both the guards—'
'Then there'd be two of us dead instead of one,'
'But if there were more of us, Dundonald. If there were ten, twenty, a hundred, all at once, pouring out through the Converter—” The idea grew in Harlow's mind. The cloud of energy that was his being pulsed and brightened, contracting into a ball of radiance. “The Vorn, Dundonald! That's our answer. The Vorn. This is their fight as much as it is ours. They built the Converter. It belongs to them, and if the Cartel takes it they'll be cut off too.'
He sensed a doubt in Dundonald's mind.
'It's true, isn't it?” he cried, wild with impatience. “You know it's true. What's the matter?'
'They're so far away,” Dundonald said. “I've hardly met any of them — only one, really, and there was one other I sensed a long way off. Most of them, I think, have left this galaxy.'
The rest of Dundonald's thought was clear in his mind for Harlow to read. The thought was,
'Then we'll have to make them,” Harlow said. “There isn't anything else to try!'
Dundonald sighed mentally. “I suppose we might as well be doing that as hanging around here watching, as helpless as two shadows.” He shot away. “Come on then. I'll take you to where I spoke with one of them. He may still be in that sector — he was studying Cepheid variables, and there were two clusters there that were unusually well supplied.'
Harlow cried. “Wait! How can I do it, how can I move-?'
'How did you move before, when you didn't think of it?” said Dundonald. “Exert your will. By will the polarity of your new electronic body is changed, so that it can grip and ride the great magnetic tides. Will it!'
Harlow did so. And a great wind between the stars seemed instantly to grip him and to carry him away with Dundonald, faster and faster.
He was first appalled, then exhilarated by it. He kept Dundonald in close contact, and the world of the Vorn, the green star, the black-walled bay, all simply vanished. There was a flick of darkness like the wink of an eyelid and they were through the Horsehead, skimming above it like swallows with their wings borne on the forces of a million suns that shone around the edges of the great dark.
This could not be happening to him. He was Mark Harlow and he was a man of Earth, not a pattern of electrons rushing faster than thought upon the magnetic millrace currents of infinity. But it was happening, and he went on and on.
At a speed compared to which light crawled, they two flashed past many-colored sparks that he knew were stars, and then before them rose up a globular cluster shaped like a swarm of hiving bees, only all the bees were suns. The swarm revolved with splendid glitterings in the blackness of space, moving onward and ever onward in a kind of grand and stately dance, while within this larger motion the component suns worked out their own complicated designs. The Cepheids waxed and waned, living their own intense inner lives, beyond understanding.
'He's not here,” said Dundonald, and sped on.
'How do you know?'
'Open your mind. Spread it wide. Feel with it.'
They plunged through the cluster. The magneto-gravitational tides must have been enough to wrench a ship apart, but to Harlow they were only something stimulating. The blaze of the sun-swarm was like thunder, overpowering, stunning, magnificent. He could strangely sense the colors that shifted and changed. White, gold, blue, scarlet, green, the flashing of a cosmic prism where every facet was a sun. It passed and they were in the outer darkness again, the cluster dwindling like a lamp behind them.
And ahead was a curtain of golden fire hung half across the universe.
'The other cluster is beyond the nebula,” Dundonald thought. “Come on—'
Going into the Horsehead had been like diving against a solid basalt cliff. This was like plunging into a furnace, into living flame. And they were both illusion. The fires of this bright nebula were as cold as the dust-laden blackness of the dark one. But they were infinitely more beautiful. The more diffuse gaseous clouds blazed with the light of their captive suns instead of blotting them out. Harlow sped with Dundonald along golden rivers, over cataracts of fire a million miles high, through coils and plumes and great still lakes of light with the stars glowing in them like phosphorescent fish.
Then there was darkness again, and another cluster growing in it, another hive of stars patched with the sick radiance of the Cepheids. And Dundonald was sending out a silent cry, and suddenly there was an answering thought, a third mind in that vastness of space and stars.
They followed that thought-voice, arrowing in toward a pallid star that throbbed like the heart of a dying man. And in the sullen glare of its corona they met a tiny flicker of radiance like themselves, a minute living star — one of the old Vorn.
'Who comes?” he said. “Who disturbs me at my work?'
Harlow sensed the strong annoyance in this strange mind, too lofty and remote for anger. He kept silent while Dundonald explained, and the mind of the Vorn kept that remoteness, that lofty detachment, and Harlow began to understand that humanity and the ant-like affairs of men had been left too far behind for this one to care now what happened to anything that wore perishable, planet-bound flesh.
He was not surprised when the Vorn answered Dundonald. “This is no concern of mine.'
Harlow's thought burst out. “But the Converter! You'll never be able to come back—'
The Vorn regarded him for an instant with a sort of curiosity. “You are very new. Both of you. Go range the stars for a thousand years and then tell me that these things matter. Now go — leave me to my studies.'
Dundonald said wearily to Harlow, “I told you they wouldn't care.'
'But they have to,” Harlow said. “Listen,” he shouted mentally at the Vorn, who was already drifting away above the curdled furnace-light of the Cepheid. “Listen, you think of this, the whole wide universe, as your country. Well, it won't be your country any longer if these men gain control of the Converter. You reprove us for disturbing you. We're only two. Millions will come through the Converter, in time. The Vorn will no longer be alone, or in any way unique. Where will your solitude be then, and your peace?'
The Vorn hesitated. “Millions?” he repeated.
'You better than I should know how many inhabited worlds there are in this galaxy. And you should remember how men fear death and try in every way to cheat it. The promise of a physical immortality will draw
