Whatever might become of his mind, it was clear that his body would die if it were left unfed and uncared-for much longer. So he had brought it back to the Jodrell Bank. He stood up and avoided Chris’s questions. “Let me get something to eat, and then get cleaned up a little.” (He had discovered that his body stank.) “Then I’ll tell you everything you want to know—you and the captain, and anybody else who wants to listen. And we’ll have to send a dispatch to Earth, too, because this is important. … But, please, I only want to tell it once.” Because—he did not say—I may not have time to tell it again.
For those cold and murderous presences in the clustered inner suns had reached out as casually as a bear flicking a salmon out of a run and snatched the unknown woman from Hatcher’s planet. They could reach anywhere in the galaxy their thoughts roamed.
They might easily follow him here.
It was good to be human again, and McCray howled with pain and joy as the icy needle-spray of the showers cleansed his body. He devoured the enormous plates of steak and potatoes the ship’s galley shoved before him, and drank chilled milk and steaming black coffee in alternate pint mugs. McCray let the ship’s surgeon look him over, and laughed at the expression in the man’s eyes. “I know I’m a little wobbly,” he said. “It doesn’t matter, Doc. You can put me in the sickbay as long as you like, as soon as I’ve talked to the captain. I won’t mind a bit. You see, I won’t be there—” and he laughed louder, and would not explain.
An hour later, with food in his belly and something from the surgeon’s hypospray in his bloodstream to clear his brain, he was in the captain’s cabin, trying to spell out in words that made sense the incredible story of (he discovered) eight days since he had been abducted from the ship.
Looking at the ship’s officers, good friends, companions on a dozen planetside leaves, McCray started to speak, stumbled and was for a moment without words. It was too incredible to tell. How could he make them understand?
They would have to understand. Insane or not, the insane facts had to be explained to them. However queerly they might stare, they were intelligent men. They would resist but ultimately they would see.
He settled his problem by telling them baldly and plainly, without looking at their faces and without waiting for their questions, everything that had happened. He told them about Hatcher and about the room in which he had come to. He told them about the pinkish light that showed only what he concentrated on—and explained it to them, as he had not understood it at first; about Hatcher’s people, and how their entire sense-world was built up of what humans called E.S.P., the “light” being only the focusing of thought, which sees no material objects that it is not fixed on. He told them of the woman from the other ship and the cruel, surgical touch on his brain that had opened a universe to him. He promised that that universe would open for them as well. He told them of the deadly, unknowable danger to Hatcher’s people—and to themselves—that lay at the galaxy’s core. He told them how the woman had disappeared, and told them she was dead—at the hands of the Old Ones from the Central Masses—a blessing to her, McCray explained, and a blessing to all of them; for although her mind would yield some of its secrets even in death, if she were alive it would be their guide, and the Old Ones would be upon them.
He did not wait for them to react.
He turned to the ship’s surgeon. “Doc, I’m all yours now, body and soul … cancel that. Just body!”
And he left them, to swim once more in space.
In so short a time McCray had come to think of this as life, and a sort of interregnum. He swept up and out, glancing back only to see the ship’s surgeon leaping forward to catch his unconscious body as it fell and then he was in space between the stars once more.
Here, ’twixt Sol and Betelgeuse, space was clear, hard and cold, no diffuse gas cloud, no new, growing suns. He “looked” toward Hatcher’s world, but hesitated and considered.
First or last, he would have to look once more upon the inimical presences that had peered out at him from the Central Masses. It might as well be now.
His perceptions alert, he plunged toward the heart of the galaxy.
Thought speeds where light plods. The mind of Herrell McCray covered light-millenia in a moment. It skipped the drifty void between spiral arms, threaded dust clouds, entered the compact central galactic sphere to which our Earth’s sector of the galaxy is only a remote and unimportant appendage. Here a great globular cluster of suns massed around a common center of gravity. McCray shrank himself to the perspective of a human body and stared in wonder. Mankind’s Sol lies in a tenuous, stretched-out arm, thinly populated by stellar standards: if Earth had circled one of these dense-clustered suns, what a different picture of the sky would have greeted the early shepherds! Where Man’s Earthbound eyes are fortunate to count a thousand stars in a winter sky, here were tens of thousands, bright enough to be a Sirius or a Capella at the bottom of a sink of atmosphere like Earth’s—tens of billions of stars in all, whirling close to each other, so that star greets
