His second in command reported: “We have the second subject out of consciousness. How long do you want us to keep her that way?”
“Until I tell you otherwise! How about the prime subject?”
“We can’t tell, Hatcher. But you were right. He is in communication with others, it seems, and by paranormal means.” Hatcher noted the dismay in what his assistant said. He understood the dismay well enough. It was one thing to work on a project involving paranormal forces as an exercise in theory. It was something else entirely to see them in operation.
But there was more cause for dismay than that, and Hatcher alone knew just how bad the situation was. He summoned one of his own members to him and impressed on it a progress report for the Council. He sent it floating through the long warrens of his people’s world, ordered his assistants back to their work and closed in his thoughts to consider what had happened.
These two creatures, with their command of forces in the paranormal—i.e., the electromagnetic—spectrum, seemed able to survive in the environments prepared for them. That was step one. No previous team had done as well. This was not the first time a probe team of his race had snatched a warmblooded biped from a spaceship for study—because their operation forces, psionic in nature, operated in non-Euclidean ways, it was easiest for them to make contact with the crew of a ship in the non-Euclidean space of F.T.L. drive.
But it was the first time that the specimens had survived. He reviewed the work they had already done with the male specimen. He had shown himself unable to live in the normal atmospheric conditions of Hatcher’s world; but that was to be expected, after all, and the creature had been commendably quick about getting out of a bad environment. Probably they had blundered in illuminating the scene for him, Hatcher conceded. He didn’t know how badly he had blundered, for the concept of “light” from a general source, illuminating not only what the mind wished to see but irrelevant matter as well, had never occurred to Hatcher or any of his race; all of their senses operated through the mind itself, and what to them was “light” was a sort of focusing of attention. But although something about that episode which Hatcher failed to understand had gone wrong, the specimen had not been seriously harmed by it. The specimen was doing well. Probably they could now go to the hardest test of all, the one which would mean success or failure. Probably they could so modify the creature as to make direct communication possible.
And the other specimen?
Hatcher would have frowned, if he had had brow muscles to shape such an expression—or a brow to be shaped. The female specimen was the danger. His own people knew how to shield their thoughts. This one evidently did not. It was astonishing that the Old Ones had not already encountered these bipeds, so loosely guarded was their radiation—when they radiated at all, of course, for only a few of them seemed to possess any psionic power worth mentioning.
Hatcher hastily drove that thought from his mind, for what he proposed to do with the male specimen was to give him that power.
And yet there was no choice for Hatcher’s people, because they were faced with disaster. Hatcher, through his communications from the Council, knew how close the disaster was. When one of the probers from the Central Masses team disappeared, the only conclusion that could be drawn was the Old Ones had discovered them. They needed allies; more, they needed allies who had control of the electromagnetic forces that made the Old Ones so potent and so feared.
In the male and female they had snatched out of space they might have found those allies. But another thought was in Hatcher’s mind: Suppose the Old Ones found them too?
Hatcher made up his mind. He could not delay any longer.
“Open the way to the surface,” he ordered. “As soon as possible, take both of them to where we can work.”
The object Captain Tillinger had called “M-42” was no stranger to Herrell McCray. It was the Great Nebula in Orion, in Earth’s telescopes a fuzzy patch of light, in cold fact a great and glowing cloud of gas. M-42 was not an external galaxy, like most of the “nebulae” in Messier’s catalogue, but it was nothing so tiny as a single sun either. Its hydrogen mass spanned dozens of light-years. Imbedded in it—growing in it, as they fed on the gas that surrounded them—were scores of hot, bright new suns.
New suns. In all the incongruities that swarmed around him McCray took time to consider that one particular incongruity. The suns of the Orion gas cloud were of the spectral class called “B”—young suns, less than a thousandth as old as a Sol. They simply had not been in existence long enough to own stable planetary systems—much less planets which themselves were old enough to have cooled, brewed chemical complexes and thus in time produced life. But surely he was on a planet. …
Wasn’t he?
McCray breathed a deep sigh and for one more time turned his mind away from unprofitable speculations. The woman stirred slightly. McCray knelt to look at her; then, on quick impulse, opened his medical kit, took out a single-shot capsule of a stimulant and slipped it neatly into the exposed vein of her arm.
In about two minutes she would be awake. Good enough, thought McCray; at least he would have someone to talk to. Now if only they could find a way out of this place. If a door would open, as the other door had, and—
He paused, staring.
There was another door. Open.
He felt himself swaying, threw out an arm and realized that he was … falling? Floating? Moving toward the door, somehow, not as though he were being dragged, not as though he were walking, but surely and rather briskly moving along.
His
