It wasn’t a volitional matter. His intentions had nothing to do with it. He flailed out, and touched nothing; nor did he slow his motion at all. He fought against it, instinctively; and then reason took over and he stopped.
The woman’s form lifted from the floor ahead of him. She was still unconscious. From the clutter on the floor, her lightweight space suit rose, too; suit and girl, they floated ahead of him, toward the door and out.
McCray cried out and tried to run after them. His legs flailed and, of course, touched nothing; but it did seem that he was moving faster. The woman and her suit were disappearing around a bend, but he was right behind them.
He became conscious of the returning reek of gases. He flipped up the plate of his helmet and lunged at the girl, miraculously caught her in one hand and, straining, caught the suit with the other.
Stuffing her into the suit was hard, awkward work, like dressing a doll that is too large for its garments; but he managed it, closed her helmet, saw the flexible parts of her suit bulge out slightly as its automatic pressure regulators filled it with air.
They drove along, faster and faster, until they came to a great portal, and out into the blinding radiance of a molten copper sky.
Gathered in a circle were a score or more of Hatcher’s people.
McCray didn’t know they were Hatcher’s people, of course. He did not know even that they were animate beings, for they lacked all the features of animals that he had been used to. No eyes. No faces. Their detached members, bobbing about seemingly at random, did not appear to have any relation to the irregular spheres that were their owners.
The woman got unevenly to her feet, her faceplate staring toward the creatures. McCray heard a smothered exclamation in his suit-phones.
“Are you all right?” he demanded sharply. The great crystal eye turned round to look at him.
“Oh, the man who spoke to me.” Her voice was taut but controlled. The accent was gone; her control was complete. “I am Ann Mei-Ling, of the Woomara. What are—those?”
McCray said, “Our kidnappers, I guess. They don’t look like much, do they?”
She laughed shakily, without answering. The creatures seemed to be waiting for something, McCray thought; if indeed they were creatures and not machines or—or whatever one might expect to find, in the impossible event of being cast away on an improbable planet of an unexplored sun. He touched the woman’s helmet reassuringly and walked toward the aliens, raising his arms.
“Hello,” he said. “I am Herrell McCray.”
He waited.
He half turned; the woman watching him. “I don’t know what to do next,” he confessed.
“Sit down,” she said suddenly. He stared. “No, you must! They want you to sit down.”
“I didn’t hear—” he began, then shrugged. He sat down.
“Now lie stretched out and open your face mask.”
“Here? Listen—Ann—Miss Mei-Ling, whatever you said your name was! Don’t you feel the heat? If I crack my mask—”
“But you must.” She spoke very confidently. “It is s’in fo—what do you call it—telepathy, I think. But I can hear them. They want you to open your mask. No, it won’t kill you. They understand what they are doing.”
She hesitated, then said, with less assurance, “They need us, McCray. There is something … I am not sure, but something bad. They need help, and think you can give it to them. So open your helmet as they wish, please.”
McCray closed his eyes and grimaced; but there was no help for it, he had no better ideas. And anyway, he thought, he could close it again quickly enough if these things had guessed wrong.
The creatures moved purposefully toward McCray, and he found himself the prisoner of a dozen unattached arms. Surprised, he struggled, but helplessly; no, he would not be able to close the plate again! … But the heat was no worse. Somehow they were shielding him.
A tiny member, like one of the unattached arms but much smaller, writhed through the air toward him, hesitated over his eyes and released something tinier still, something so small and so close that McCray could not focus his eyes upon it. It moved deliberately toward his face.
The woman was saying, as if to herself, “The thing they fear is—far away, but—oh, no! My God!”
There was a terrible loud scream, but McCray was not quite sure he heard it. It might have been his own, he thought crazily; for that tiny floating thing had found his face and was burrowing deep inside; and the pain was beyond belief.
The pain was incredible. It was worse than anything he had ever felt, and it grew … and then it was gone.
What it was that the spheroidal aliens had done to his mind McCray had no way of learning. He could only know that a door had been open. An opaque screen was removed. He was free of his body.
He was more than free, he was extended—increased—enlarged. He was inside the body of an alien, and the alien was in him. He was also outside both, looking at them.
McCray had never felt anything like it in his life. It was a situation without even a close analogue. He had had a woman in his arms, he had been part of a family, he had shared the youthful sense of exploration that comes in small, eager groups: These were the comparisons that came to his mind. This was so much more than any of these things. He and the alien—he and, he began to perceive, a number of aliens—were almost inextricably mingled. Yet they were separate, as one strand of colored thread in a ball of yarn is looped and knotted and intertwined with every other strand, although it retains its own integrity. He was in and among many minds, and outside them all. McCray thought: This is how a god must feel.
Hatcher would have laughed—if he had lips, larynx or mouth to
