'Rating Eight speaking, Officer. There's something coming at the forward slice.'
Will Archer swiveled around the telescope while the rating gave the coordinates of whatever they had picked up. Archer finally found it and held it. It was a spiral of some kind headed at them, obviously, speed more than a mile a second and decelerating.
'Stop ship. Cut.'
'Cut, Officer.'
'That thing can't reach us for a while yet. Meantime let's consider what we just got ourselves into.'
'We just got ourselves through a big slew of protoplasm that acts as a sort of heavenly sphere—primum mobile—for a solar system that our Calculator considers unlikely.'
'True. I suggest that we keep ourselves very carefully in check now.
There's been some laxity of thinking going on during the voyage; it is understandable. We've all been under extraordinary stress. Now that the hardest part—perhaps—is over, we cannot afford to relax. By all accounts what is coming at us is a vessel. It is unlikely to suppose that this protosphere is accidental; if it were, there would be as much reason to believe that there is intelligent life on those fifteen planets, inasmuch as they are so close to the source of life-spores. I hope that in whatever befalls us we shall act as worthy representatives of our species.'
'Pompous ass!' rang through the ship. The E.O. turned very red.
'May we come aboard?' asked the laughing voice again.
'By all means,' said the psychologist. 'It would be somewhat foolish to deny you entrance when you've already perfected communications.'
'Thank you.'
There slipped through the hull of the sphere three ordinary-looking persons of approximately the same build as Will Archer. They were conventionally dressed.
'How did you do that?' asked the Calculator.
'Immaterial. The matter, I mean. I mean, the topic,' said one of them.
'That's one fiendish language you speak. The wonder is that you ever managed to get off the ground.'
'If our intrusion into your solar system is resented,' said the E.O., 'we'll leave at once. If it is not, we should like to examine that shell you have.
We would gratefully accept any knowledge you might offer us from your undoubtedly advanced civilization.'
'Eh? What's that?'
'He means,' explained another of the visitors to the sphere, 'that we're stronger than he is, and that he'd like to become strong enough to blow us to powder.'
'Why didn't he say so?' asked the second.
'Can't imagine. Limitations of his symbology, I expect. Now, man, can you give us a good reason why we should help you become strong enough to blow us to powder?' Stiffly Archer nodded to Mamie Tung.
'We have no claim on you, nor have you on us. We wish to take a sample of your protosphere and depart for our own system.'
'In other words, my good woman, you realize that time doesn't figure largely in this matter, and that you don't care whether you or your grandchildren blow us to powder?'
'I can't understand it,' commented one of the others in a stage whisper.
'Why this absurd insistence on blowing us to powder?'
'Do I pretend to understand the processes of a lump of decaying meat?'
declared the first. 'I do not.'
'No more than I. What makes them go?'
'Something they call 'progress.' I think it means blowing everything else to powder.'
'What unpleasantness!'
'So I should say. What do you propose doing to them?'
'We might blow them to powder.'
'Let's find out first what makes them run.' The first turned on Yancey Mears. 'Why are you built differently from the E.O.? We can allow for individual variations, but even to this untrained eye there's a staggering discrepancy.'
Yancey Mears explained that she was a woman and calmly went into details, interrupted occasionally by gurgling noises from the boarders.
Finally it was too much; the three visitors broke into cries for mercy between bellows of laughter.
'And you thought they were humorless!' accused the third.
'This one's probably a comic genius. Though why they'd send a comic genius on an expedition of this kind I don't know. You—you don't suppose that it's all true—do you?
Suddenly sobered they inspected Yancey and the Psychologist, exchanging significant nods.
'Well …though you things are the most ludicrous sights of an abnormally long lifetime we're prepared to be more than equitable with you. Our motivation is probably far beyond your system of ethics—
being, as it is, a matter of blowing things to powder—but we can give you a hint of it by saying that it will help as a sort of self-discipline.
Beyond that, you will have to discover for yourself.
'What we propose for you is a thing much more gentle than being blown into powder. With courage, ability, common sense and inspiration you will emerge unharmed.'
'Go on,' said the Psychologist.
'Go on? It's begun already. We'll take our leaves now.'
As his two companions slipped through the hull of the sphere, the last of the boarders turned to Yancey Mears.
'Er—what you were saying—it was a comic monologue, wasn't it?'
'No. It was strict biological truth.'
The boarder wistfully asked: 'I don't suppose I could see it done?
Thought not. Good day.' The three departed abruptly as they had come.
'What's begun already?' Star Macduff asked the Executive.
'I don't know. What do you suppose we've come into contact with now?'
'They're hard to size up,' said Mamie Tung. 'The humor—it's very disturbing. Apparently it didn't take them more than a few minutes to pick up our entire language and system of thought. It wasn't a simple job of mind- reading; they obviously grasped symbology, as well. They said so themselves.'
'And what do you suppose they really look like?' asked Star in a thin, hysterical tone.
'Shut it,' ordered Will Archer. 'That's panic-mongering, pure and simple. Normally, I'd order you back with the ratings for a comment like that. Since we're up against extraordinary circumstances, I'll stay execution for the duration of the emergency.'
The Calculator did not reply; he seemed scarcely to have heard the rebuke. He was staring abstractedly at nothing. The notion overcame the three other Officers slowly—very slowly—that something was amiss.
Yancey Mears first felt physically sick; then a peculiar numbness between the eyes, then a dull, sawing pain that ran over her whole skull.
She blinked her eyes convulsively; felt vertiginous yet did not fall; felt a curious duplicate sensation, as though she were beside herself and watching her body from outside—as though all lights she saw were doubled, as though the mass of her body was twice what it had been.
Alarmed, she reached out for Will Archer's arm. It was not till she had tried the simple gesture that she realized how appallingly askew everything was. She reached, she thought, but her hands could not coordinate; she thought that she had extended both hands instead of one. But she had not. Dizzily she looked down, saw that her left hand lay against her body; that her right hand was extended, reaching for Archer; that her left hand was extended and that her right hand lay against her body …
'Will, what's wrong?' The dizziness, the fear, the panic, doubled and tripled, threatened to engulf her. For her voice was not her own but a double voice, coming from two throats, one a little later than the other.
'Will …' No, she couldn't outrace the phenomenon; her voice was doubled in some insane fashion. She felt cold, tried to focus her eyes on Archer. Somehow the blackness of space seemed to come between them.
