gone. The box was not very heavy. I set it down again with care.
'All right,' I said. 'Fine. But what about me? Why should I help you?'
'Paynter will kill you if you don't,' Belem said patiently. 'If he doesn't his superiors will as soon as it's established that you're a carrier of that nekronic killer, whatever it is. And I think I know. If you help me I believe I can solve that problem too.
'There are two obvious reasons why I'll protect you. First, I can't get out of your brain until you're in physical contact with me again. If you're killed before then the psychic rapport impact may kill me too. After we finish this job you'll get in the transmitter and return to the world where I am now – the one where you first saw me. As for the second reason – '
A sudden, violent contraction of all my muscles, like a simultaneous cramp in every limb, doubled me up without the slightest warning. I fell forward – saw the floor hurtling toward me – and felt my rebellious muscles relax again just in time to save myself from a crash. I was so startled that I scarcely noticed the lance of gauzy light, tendriled like a cobweb, that floated in the spot from which I had just been hurled. But Belem's thought said,
What happened after that took almost no time at all.
When I got my feet under me I whirled and faced the opened door-panel and the man standing there in arrested motion, weapon lifted. It was Paynter, his pale eyes glittering, his mouth drawn down in a grimace of anger and surprise. The weapon had a basket-hilt and a muzzle that looked like rubbery lips, puffing in and out petulantly.
Belem had sensed his presence before I did. It was the Mechandroid's control of my motor reflexes that had jerked me forward in a spasmodic dodge that barely cleared the blast of the puffing weapon.
I had no weapon of my own. Paynter was centering his on me for a second, more accurate shot. I hadn't the ghost of an idea how to avoid it.
'What do I do now?' I demanded in desperation of the mind in my brain.
'I don't know – be quiet, I'm trying to think!' was all Belem had to offer.
I sought Paynter's eyes, trying to put hypnosis into my own, saying, 'Now wait a minute, Paynter! Hold on! I – '
He did not answer in words. He raised the weapon and took deliberate aim at me. I wondered whether he had been following from the first, how much he knew – why he chose to kill me now, without hearing a word of defense. He wasn't even curious about how I'd got here.
The puffy mouth of his weapon sucked in deeply and began to pout out again. In another second a web of light would shoot out at me and there was no room here even to dodge again, without colliding with that pedestal upon which the marble in its glass box rested. If I dodged I'd hit it.
If I dodged I'd –
That was the answer, of course. So obvious neither of us had seen it. It was the simplest answer in the world.
No one can say he wasn't fast. His mind recognized the danger I had dropped in his hands in the same instant his muscles reacted. There was only one possible thing to do, and he did it. He dropped his gun and caught the precious and terribly dangerous box in mid-air.
I didn't stop to watch. I was already halfway through the door of the matter-projector by the time Paynter's weapon hit the floor. I slammed the door shut with one kick and put my hands on the wall where the dials were.
On the other side of the slammed door, Paynter would be rushing the box back into place, back into its bath before the two-minute interval elapsed that would activate the thing and stop all matter-transmission for a cubic mile. If he fumbled it I was stuck here – unless Belem moved fast.
Luckily he moved. My fingers, without my own volition, were hastily spinning the verniered dials. Tarnished metal walls flashed into view around me.
18. SPACE WRECK
Belem said, 'No, we're not going out. We're in the transmitter of an abandoned space-ship around Centaurus II. We located it from our laboratory years ago. We know a good many of these out-of-the-way transmitters, useful in cases just like this. I can't set the controls to take us directly to my headquarters or Paynter could simply read the dials and follow us as he did from the Swan Garden.'
I found I was breathing hard. The Mechandroid said we'd have to hurry. 'We transported several cubic yards of air with us but that won't last long. Here, let me – '
I watched my hands move deftly on the corroded dials.
I had one dizzying moment in which I thought of the terrible deeps of space all around us, the dead ship circling an alien star-group while our last air seeped out around us into the infinities of the dark.
Fortunately for my own sanity, I had very little time in my turbulent hours in this middle future to pause and think. I had been catapulted into a culture so different from my own that my mind could not, I think, have endured the concept of those vast spaces which everyone here took as a commonplace. It was only in the small, unchanging superficialities of the culture that I could conceive bf it at all.
The walls shimmered, blurred – were translucent metal through which I could see a circle of bright green grass and a ring of low-roofed houses whose eaves turned up like Chinese roofs. The only living things in sight were a pigeon, flying low and trailing a red ribbon in its beak, and a dog who ran below, jumping to catch the ribbon now and then. I could hear it barking.
'Hurry,' Belem said and my hands found the dials on the clouded transparency of the wall. These dials were set in rings of colored tile but they worked like any other dials. I turned them, the room blurred ...
I had had no idea there could be such a variety of transmitter-receiver rooms. Few of them had transparent walls, so that I had to guess what lay outside, but the rooms themselves ranged from functional steel boxes to padded lounges. Several times they swam with the perfume of exotic unknowns who must just have stepped out after a trip from – who could begin to guess where?
And once two wilting flowers the size of dinner-plates and colored a deep plushy crimson lay on a glass floor where some traveler had dropped them, stepping out. They went with us through four transitions and we left them at the fifth when Belem said at last, 'Here we'll get out. It's another concourse. I think we'll be safe now if we take a long jump to my base laboratory. Open the door.'
Like the other concourse it reminded me vividly, of the Times Square shuttle. Crowds hurried across vast open spaces, vanished into cubicles and poured from other cubicles in an intricate mesh of movement that linked a whole galaxy together.
'See that row of doors with the blue lights over them?' Belem said. 'Try to find an empty booth. I think the third from the end – '
A door opened as he indicated – with my own hand – which one he meant and a fat man in a long furred cloak upon which snow lay in still unmelted crystals came bustling importantly out, beating his cloak as he came.
I stepped in, closed the door, avoiding the puddles of melting snow which the fat man had tracked in from some world I couldn't imagine. Perhaps Earth.
'These rooms would be a fine way to spread disease, wouldn't they?' I asked Belem as I reached for the dial. 'No telling where this snow-water came from, but it'll go along with us, I suppose, and we'll track your laboratory with melted water from Neptune or Canopus or – '
'It is most unlikely,' Belem began pedantically in my mind, 'that you would find snow – '
