While Langford held his breath Joan pressed her palms to her temples. “The rustling is becoming clear. There are swift, abrupt movements, accompanied by thoughts. But I’m not sure whether the thoughts come from one mind or many minds. The thoughts are swift, piercing. Darting thoughts. That’s the only way I can describe them.”
Her voice rose slightly. “I can sense a living presence deep inside the ship. More than one, I think. There’s a kind of swarming.”
“A swarming?”
“I’m not sure about that,” Joan said, quickly. “I don’t think they’re moving about much. The thoughts seem to come from one direction. I can just make out a shape now; it’s tall, and very slender.”
“Winged?” Langford whispered.
“No, no, don’t prompt me!” Joan was excited. “The important thing is that I can see it. I may never see it clearly. Gauzy—yes, it is winged. It has gauzy, shining wings, folded on its chest. Two clawlike appendages, raised in a praying attitude. Perhaps I saw that in your mind; you mustn’t interrupt again.”
“I won’t!” Langford promised.
“The creature is horribly agitated!” Joan said. “It looks upon your ship as a menace. Its brain is humming with fear; it is preparing to contact you, warn you. It’s getting ready to warn you in a strange way. It has prepared something for just such an emergency. Something small, glistening. I can’t make it out, but it’s putting the object into a luminous shell!”
“That’s right!” Langford said, forgetting his promise. “They shot the shell into the void; we picked it up with a magnetic trawl.”
There was a brief silence as Joan thought that out. Then her lips twisted in a strained smile. “If you say another word—”
“Sorry!”
“It’s bad; it hinders.” She raised her arms in a gesture of grim urgency. “Now the ship is moving swiftly away from your ship. I can dimly sense vast distances rushing past. And there’s a feeling of loneliness, of utter desolation. No despair, exactly; it’s as though I were sensing the utter desolation of deep space through a mind filled with a bitter nostalgia!
“If the feeling wasn’t so intense, so strange and bewildering, I’d say it was a ‘Carry me back to old Virginia’ feeling! Does that make sense to you? It’s like—someone thrumming a guitar a billion miles from home, whistling to keep up his courage, remembering something very precious and beautiful lost forever. I can’t explain it in any other way.”
She was silent for a moment. Then she said: “Now a planet is taking shape in the darkness. It’s pale green and crossed by a long, wavering streamer of light. I can make out continents and seas.”
Joan stiffened. “Ralph! There’s only one planet in the Solar System that catches the sunlight through great swarms of meteors in the plane of its ecliptic. The lights of the Zodiac! It must be the Earth!”
Langford dared not speak for fear of breaking the spell. Joan was trembling now, as though thoughts from the past were impinging with a tormenting intensity on her inner vision.
“The ship’s out of control!” came suddenly. “It’s plunging down through the lower atmosphere toward a vast expanse of jungle. A tropical rain forest. A mist is rising over the trees and a burst of flame is coming from the ship. It’s zigzagging as it descends.”
Emotion seemed to quiver through her. For a moment she remained silent, her lips slightly parted.
Then more words came in a rush. “The ship lies on an island in a forking river. Above it the foliage is charred, blackened. There are three rivers and just below the island the water is white with foam. There’s a tremendous cataract about five miles below the island. It’s the largest cataract I’ve ever seen.”
There was an eagerness on Langford’s face, but he remained silent.
“There’s a man swimming in the river above the cataract,” Joan went on. “A brown-skinned man with straggly hair, his shoulders gleaming in the sunlight. I’m going to try to read his mind.”
Langford did not move. For a moment there was no sound in the room save Joan’s harsh breathing. Then, suddenly, she straightened and ripped the bandage from her eyes.
“Brazil!” she exclaimed, exultantly. “Darling, I’ve located the ship for you. That island is in the interior of Brazil, in the deep jungle, close to the headwaters of the Amazon!”
Langford stood very still, scarcely daring to breathe. In his mind’s gaze he saw a slender space cruiser lying unguarded in a suburban hanger close to the dark waters of the great Northwestern Canal. Commander Gurney’s own private cruiser, the White Hawk!
How much of his mental audacity was inspired by sheer desperation Langford could not guess. But he suddenly saw himself climbing out of a thrumming jet plane in deep shadows and running straight toward the cruiser with Joan at his side.
He saw the cruiser ascending, saw himself at the controls, with the red disk of Mars dwindling beyond the viewport. He saw the myriad stars of space and the rapidly expanding disk of the Earth pierced by wavering banners of light.
And then it dawned on him that in some strange way Joan had seen the vision first and was sharing it with him. He knew then that he could not fail.
IV
Beneath the descending cruiser the roof of the forest gleamed in russet and emerald splendor above a labyrinth of wooded archipelagoes.
It still seemed a little like a dream to Langford, but he knew that it wasn’t. The vision that he had experienced three days before, standing beside his wife in a white-walled room, had taken on the bright, firm texture of reality.
He stood before the controls, with a thrumming deck under him, and studied the shifting landscape through the White Hawk’s viewport. He had never before flown directly over the Amazon Basin,
