if he needs anything make the necessary additions.”
She held out her hand, and suddenly it was holding a flask of straw-yellow liquid.
“I want you to try to take this from me. Can you do that? Then drink all of it and try to talk to me.”
Peron lifted his arm, and again there was the feeling that the laws of physics had been changed. It took deliberate control to make his hand move in the direction that he wanted. He carefully took the container, brought it back to his mouth, and drank. It was like balm, soothing his throat and making him realize for the first time that he was desperately thirsty. He drank it all. “Good. Command: Take it away.” The flask was gone. The woman looked a little less irritated. “Can you speak? Try a word.”
Peron swallowed, worked his vocal chords, and was rewarded with a grunt and a grating cough. He tried again.
“Yaahh. Y-Yaasss.” His voice sounded alien in his ears.
“Excellent. Give it time. And listen to me. You have to know just a few things, and there’s nothing to be gained by waiting to tell you them. Do you know who the Immortals are?”
“They vissi — vizzit — Pen’coss. Don’ know if ‘uman — or not. Lave — live — f’rever.” “Wish that were true.” The woman gave Peron a sour smile. “I’m an Immortal. And now, so are you. But we won’t live forever. We’ll live about seventeen hundred years, according to our best current estimates — if we don’t get killed somehow along the way. That’s one thing you have to learn. You can be killed just as easily now as you could before. Living in S-space won’t protect you. Understand?”
“Unn-derstand.” The skin on Peron’s face felt as though it had been stretched tight, and it could not show the emotion he was feeling. If he was an Immortal, what had happened to the others? Would he outlive Elissa by sixteen hundred years? No good news could make that thought palatable. He lifted his head — again, that strange feeling — and looked at the woman directly. “What happ’n to others on Whir’gig?”
“I’m not in a position to tell you that. I told you, what Wilmer did for you has made more trouble than he dreamed. Before we are permitted to tell you more, we have to get approval from Sector Headquarters, and that means a long trip. We’ve been on the way for about five hours already, and it will be nearly two days before we get there. Until we do, you’ll have to be patient.
“My patient, as it happens.” She gave him her first real smile. “You can start by resting some. In a few minutes you’ll get a reaction from the historex, and I’m going to give you another sedative and painkiller now. Command: Give this man five c.c.’s of asfanol.”
Nothing visible, but again a surprise ache of something in his thigh. Peron wasn’t at all ready to go to sleep — there were a hundred questions to be answered, and he wasn’t sure where to start.
“Are we going back to The Ship?”
The woman looked startled, then amused. “No. I can’t tell you much, but I can tell you that. We’re on a longer trip — Sector Headquarters is outside the Cass system — nearly a light-year away from Cassay and Pentecost.”
“And we’ll be there in two days. So you do travel faster than light!” Now she was looking very uncomfortable. “I’m not supposed to tell you anything. I’m a doctor, not a damned administrator.” There was an irritation at somebody or something in her tone, and Peron filed it away for future reference. “But we don’t travel faster than light. In S-space, light travels almost two thousand light-years of normal distance in one of our years. We’re travelling at only a fraction of light-speed.”
Peron was overwhelmed by the thought. Could she be telling the truth? If she were, Sol and Earth itself were only a couple of months away. And if they had been on their journey for five hours already, they must be deep into interstellar space. He was beginning to feel drowsy, but suddenly he had a tremendous desire to see Cassay again. And what would the starscape be like, at this tremendous speed?
“What’s wrong?” She had seen his expression.
“Can we look out of here — look at the stars?”
She shook her head. “I sometimes have that wish myself. When you wake up, take a look in the next room. There’s an exterior port there. You’ll find that things look rather different in S-space. But now, I have to go. My name, by the way, is Ferranti; Dr. Olivia Ferranti. I will be seeing a good deal of you until we’re sure that you are stable here. And I’ll be back tomorrow.” She gave him a reassuring nod. “Be patient. Command: Take me to my apartment.”
“But what — “
Peron didn’t bother to finish his sentence. She had gone, vanished instantly into the air. In another thirty seconds the drugs had taken him and he was sound asleep.
The room where he had first regained consciousness lacked clothing, food, or drink. There was a terminal near the table, which must clearly communicate with other parts of the ship, but when he next awoke Peron resisted his first urge, to call and ask for something to eat. He felt ravenous, and still oddly disoriented, but there were other overriding priorities.
All the monitors by the table were still working, but now they received telemetered data originating from small sensors attached to his body. They undoubtedly passed on those signals to some central monitoring computer, possibly one that responded only to emergencies. Peron felt that he should have at least a few minutes before his actions were controlled again. He slid off the table, took a moment to collect his balance, and then headed for one of the room’s two doors.
It led to a long windowless corridor. Wrong choice. He backtracked, and found that the other led to a bigger room, with a great transparent port at one end. Peron went to it and stared out.
He had certainly expected something different from the usual starscape seen from within the Cass system; perhaps the familiar constellations, but subtly distorted. But what he was looking at was wholly inexplicable.
Beyond the port, the whole sky was filled with a faint, pearly glow. It seemed to possess no orientation, and everywhere it was of the same uniform brightness. No stars, no nebulae, no dust clouds, no galaxies; the whole universe had disappeared, lost in a diffuse, glowing haze.
Peron felt his head begin to spin. He was in S-space, and it was so far different from anything he had imagined that he had no idea what to do next. If he had been trapped and held prisoner — for that was the way he was beginning to perceive his situation on this ship — in any ordinary environment he could perhaps have gained control and had some say in his own actions. But what could he do here? There was nothing in Pentecost’s science that even hinted at the possibility of this. Sy, far more able scientifically than Peron, had scoffed at the very idea.
Peron felt a moment of annoyance. If only Sy could be here now, to see how far his theories would take him.…
The rest of the room lacked any furnishings or useful sources of information. There was a set of small and mysterious doors or panels in the base of the wall, each only a couple of feet high, but he could not open them. He turned to go back to the corridor, and was reminded of his own hunger and thirst. He remembered Dr. Ferranti’s ability to conjure drink from nothing (And ask Sy to explain that, while he was at it!). Could it possibly work for him, too? There seemed nothing he could lose by trying.
“Command.” Even though he was alone, he felt self-conscious — what he was attempting was impossible! But it had worked, he was convinced of that. “Command. Bring me a drink.”
He waited, feeling foolish. And to confirm his feeling, absolutely nothing happened. He tried once more. “Command. Bring me something to eat.” Nothing. How could anything else be the result? He must have been hallucinating, to be convinced that Ferranti had magical powers to make objects — including herself — appear and disappear instantly.
Peron had scarcely come to that conclusion when everything about him changed in one brief and bewildering flicker of movement. There was a second of total disorientation. Then he was no longer standing at the entrance to the corridor. Instead he was in a room with pale yellow walls, decorated with elaborate murals and amateurish paintings. He was fully clothed, in well-fitting brown shirt and trousers. His own shoes, last seen when he donned a suit before leaving for Whirlygig, were on his feet. He was seated in a hard chair, with his hands resting firmly on its arms. In front of him was a long, polished desk of silvery metal, its upper surface containing a single, orange folder and one pen. And sitting behind that desk, looking at him with a slightly bored and definitely supercilious
