Dimly he groped for Bruce Hallam, who had opened the door for them all. Bruce was missing. And as for Byrna—it was Byrna’s eyes through which he saw them. Her mind, gripping his like the clasp of hands, cupping his like a bowl of still water. Soundlessly through space came a voice. Kua’s voice.
“Byrna, have you found him?”
“I think—yes. Kern! Kern!”
Without words, he answered them.
“Yes, Kua. Yes, Byrna. I’m here.”
There was resentment in Kua’s voice—the voice of her mind, for no words were spoken in this curious séance. Kern found time to wonder briefly if Byrna had always possessed this strange ability to bridge distances, or if it had burgeoned in her here as something struggled in himself for new being.
“We’ve been trying a long time, Kern,” Kua said coldly. “You were hard to reach.”
“I—I wasn’t sure you’d be here any longer.”
“You thought we’d have gone on to other worlds. Well, we would have, if we could. But Bruce was hurt. In the storm.”
“Badly?”
She hesitated. “We—can’t be sure. Look.”
Through Byrna’s eyes Kern saw Bruce Hallam’s motionless figure, lying silent on a bed of boughs. He looked oddly pale, almost ivory in color. His breathing was nearly imperceptible. And Byrna’s mind, groping through the void for his, found only a strange, dim spinning—something too far away and too abstract for the normal mind to grasp. She touched it briefly—and it spun out of contact and was gone.
“A trance?” Kua said. “We don’t know, yet. But we’ve used Byrna’s vision and learned a little about this world. How much do you know, Kern?”
Kern told them then, with Byrna’s tongue, too absorbed in the needs of the moment to realize fully what a strange meeting this was of more than human minds, over unguessed distances of alien land. He told them what he knew, what he had guessed from overheard conversations—not much, but a general picture.
“The planet’s mostly ocean. A small continent, about the size of Australia, I think. City-states all over it. Elje’s band are outlaws. They have a hideout somewhere, and they raid the towns. They seem—well, scornful of the townspeople, and a little afraid, too. I can’t quite understand that.”
“This—Gerd? He spoke of a Mountain?” Kua said.
“Yes. Something about—when the Mountain walks.”
“You know the Mountain,” Kua said. “The storm came from there. Those vortices of light and energy rose out of it.”
Kern remembered the spindles of blinding brilliance that strode across the land in the maelstrom of the winds. “We don’t understand much of it yet,” Kua was saying in a troubled tone. “We know there’s danger connected with that Mountain. I think there is life there, something we don’t know about. Something that probably couldn’t have developed on Earth. The conditions could have been too alien. But here anything is possible.”
Kern felt the thought forming in his brain—in Byrna’s brain.
“Life? Intelligent life? What do you know about it?”
“Maybe not life as we understand the word. Call it a—force. No, it’s more tangible than that. I don’t know—” The thought-voice of Kua faltered. “Dangerous. We may learn more of it, if we live. This much we’ve seen, though, through Byrna’s vision, and mine. We’ve sensed forces reaching out from the Mountain, into the minds of men. The minds of the winged townspeople. Assembling them for war.” She hesitated. “Kern, do you know they’re on their way now, to your town, where the outlaws are?”
He was instantly alert.
“Now? From where? How soon can they get here?”
“I’m not sure. They aren’t in my sight yet—over the horizon, that is. Byrna, tell him.”
The mind that held Kern’s stirred, and through it he saw as through a haze rank upon rank of winged beings flying with steady beasts of their pinions over a dark nighttime terrain. Byrna’s thought murmured,
“You see, I can’t tell how far. It’s new, this clairvoyance since we came from Earth. I could always see but not so clearly, and I never could show others what was in my mind. So I only know these men are flying against your village.”
“And the force of men—the Mountain, I think, has armed them somehow,” Kua put in. “Byrna has seen the weapons they carry. You’d better warn your friends—your jailers or whatever they are. Otherwise you may be caught in the middle of a fight.”
“I will.” Kern’s mind was full now of something new. “You say you’ve developed this clairvoyance since the time when you came here, Byrna. Has it happened to the others, too?”
“To me, maybe, a little,” Kua said slowly. “A sharpening of focus, not much more than that. To Sam—” Her thought form glanced sidewise to Sam Brewster, sitting silent, with the hood of his secondary lids drawn over his terrible eyes, “—I think nothing’s happened. He can’t join our talk now, you see. Byrna’s mind can’t reach into his at all. We’ll have to tell him all that’s been said, later. And Bruce.” She shrugged. “Perhaps the winged people will tell you how we can help him. The edge of one of the vortices caught him, and he’s been like this ever since. We’d hoped to go on, you know, Kern, to find our own worlds as you—perhaps—have found yours. But without Bruce, we’re helpless.”
Kern was aware of a tightening and strengthening of his own mind as a problem at last came before him that must be met. Until now he had been almost in a trance of wonder and delight and dismay at the new things of this new, winged world. But the time for lassitude was over. He gathered his thoughts for speech, but Kua’s voice cut his beginning phrases short.
“Kern, there’s danger in the Mountain. The—thing—whatever
