both ways. And in draining the slaves, Kern found himself draining the Enemy itself—reaching back and back through each slave into the source from which that strength came.
From a score, a hundred channels, the Mountain must have felt its own power drain away. Its power, but not its hate. Kern could feel the sheer, inhuman malevolence burning about him in great washes of flame as the strength of the coils against his grew steadily weaker. The fire sank down within it, dimming and fading as the creature bled its own power away—bled flame, and slowly, slowly died!
The turning ribbons of light no longer moved against Kern’s awareness. His limbs engulfed not a luminous involuted band, but a thin, pale hatred which fell apart as he drew his own body back. It fell apart into a tiny rain of droplets, each of them dancing with its own seed of hate. Twinkling, fading, and the hatred fading with them, until they were gone.
Kern felt change all about him, in the substance of the Mountain itself. A vast, imponderable shifting of the clouded glass, a falling apart of the atoms which composed it, as its soul of fire had fallen. The opalescent stuff was a fog—a mist—a thin, dissipating gas which no longer supported him. The cold of clear air struck terribly upon his fiery limbs as the Mountain dissolved from about him. He convulsed upon himself in a knot of flame that seemed to consume itself and to cease—to cease—
Everything was blank around him. Neither dark nor light, but void. He hung motionless upon nothing. He was no longer a shape of flame. He was no longer a shape of flesh. He was nothing, nowhere.
This was infinity, where time was not. For milleniums, he thought, he drifted there upon oblivion. Milleniums, or moments!
From far away a something began to be. He did not recognize it—he knew only that where nothingness had been, now there was a something. He heard a call. That was it, a call, a sound of incredible sweetness.
A voice? Yes, it was a voice of sheer melody, saying a name. He did not know the name.
“Kern—Kern,” it cried. The syllable had no meaning to him, but the sweetness of the voice that shaped it gradually began to rouse him from his stupor. Over and over the syllable sounded, and then with a sudden blaze of awareness he knew it for what it was.
“My name!” he thought with amazement. “My own name!”
The mind came back into him, and he knew. Like Bruce Hallam, he had hung frozen and empty from the touch of the all-consuming fire which had been himself. Like Bruce, he had been emptier than death.
“Kern, Kern, come back,” wailed the voice of impossible sweetness. He knew it now. Byrna’s voice, lovely as a siren’s magical song, summoning him back to the living.
Slowly, slowly, he felt warmth return to him. Slowly he drew his mind together again, and then his body came back around him, and with infinite effort he lifted the eyelids that shut out the world.
He lay on a hillside in the full warm tide of the sunlight which poured down from an empty sky. There was no Mountain any more. No vertiginous thunderhead of glass towering up the zenith, casting its pale shadow across the world. Someone bent over him, holding her wings to shut the sun’s glare from his eyes. Her wings glistened.
Tentatively he flexed his own. And then strength came back with a magical rush to him, and he sat up with a strong beat of his pinions that almost lifted him from the ground. All around him smiling faces watched in the shadow of their wings.
And he knew that he was free at last, and the winged world was free. And he was no longer alien.
The Big Night
A Novelet of the Spaceways
I
Last of the Hyper-Ships
She came lumbering up out of the ecliptic plane of the planets like a wallowing space-beast, her jet tubes scarred and stained, a molten streak across her middle where Venus’s turgid atmosphere had scarred her, and every ancient spot-weld in her fat body threatened to rip apart the moment she hit stress again.
The skipper was drunk in his cabin, his maudlin voice echoing through the compartments as he bewailed the unsympathetic harshness of the Interplanetary Trade Commission.
There was a mongrel crew from a dozen worlds, half of them shanghaied. Logger Hilton, the mate, was trying to make sense out of the tattered charts, and La Cucaracha, her engines quaking at the suicidal thought, was plunging ahead through space into the Big Night.
In the control room a signal light flared. Hilton grabbed a mike.
“Repair crew!” he yelled. “Get out on the skin and check jet A-six. Move!”
He turned back to his charts, chewing his lip and glancing at the pilot, a tiny, inhuman Selenite, with his arachnoid multiple limbs and fragile-seeming body. Ts’ss—that was his name, or approximated it—was wearing the awkward audio-converter mask that could make his subsonic voice audible to human ears, but, unlike Hilton, he wasn’t wearing space-armor. No Lunarian ever needed protection against deep space. In their million years on the Moon, they had got used to airlessness. Nor did the ship’s atmosphere bother Ts’ss. He simply didn’t trouble to breathe it.
“Blast you, take it easy!” Hilton said. “Want to tear off our hide?”
Through the mask the Selenite’s faceted eyes glittered at the mate.
“No, sir. I’m going as slowly as I can on jet fuel. As soon as I know the warp formulae, things’ll ease up a bit.”
“Ride it! Ride it—without jets!”
“We need the acceleration to switch over to warp, sir.”
“Never mind,” Hilton said. “I’ve got it now. Somebody must have been breeding fruit-flies all over these charts. Here’s the dope.” He dictated a few equations that Ts’ss’ photographic memory assimilated at once.
A distant howling came from far off.
“That’s the skipper, I suppose,” Hilton said. “I’ll be back in a minute. Get into
