Up the Walls of the World

Chapter 24

Among the incoming life-rush of the Tyrenni are eight minds that had been human and one that had been a dog.

The entity which calls itself Daniel Dann loses contact with everything as his life is whirled up on the strange Beam, leaving his dying body behind. He feels himself a swimmer shot through a turbulent millrace, swirled and spewed out to the shallows of the throng. A moment later he strands on something, he can’t tell what, but only clutches at it and finds that it sustains his life.

He has had practice in wild discarnations, but this is the most alien of all. He is still alive, still seemingly himself, but bodiless. Now he has no limbs, no senses, nothing—yet he lives.

A fearful aloneness strikes him. As it threatens to rise to panic, he perceives that his naked mind is receiving input, vague but insistent. This void is not empty. All around him is a sense of calling, or signaling, in some mode he can’t quite receive. Others are here, he realizes. They have all come somewhere, life is near him now. But he has no idea how to make contact. The terror of isolation hammers in him; he strains to hang onto himself, to face the menace of this weird escape from death.

Or is it escape? A new terror takes hold. Has he died, is this what the dying mind feels as it leaves life forever? Will the sense of presence fade, and float away forever, leaving him in eternal isolation in the dark?

He tries to “listen” again. Whatever the elusive susurrus whispering around him is, it does not seem to be fading. Hold onto yourself, Dann. The others must be here too, wherever this is. Are they, too, frightened? Try to reach them.

But how can he? He has no idea.

Experimentally he forms the thought of Valerie—no yellow-bikinied body, but Valerie’s world as he had touched it—and tries to project her name. Valerie, he wills, VALERIE, ARE YOU HERE?

Nothing answers him. Ignorant of the mad commotion he is generating, Dann runs through the names. FRODO! RICK, RON WAXMAN! Can you hear me? WINONA! CHRIS?

Still no answer he can detect. Is he doomed never to make contact, to continue so horribly alone in nowhere?

Perhaps the Tyrenni, he thinks, and imagines himself shouting with all his might. TIVONEL! HELP ME PLEASE!

This time something does happen. He has been mindlessly lunging forward as he tries to call, and now a sensory image blooms in his mind. For an instant he is blown by the great gales of Tyree. “Heagran!” says a soundless voice.

He grasps at it, but it is gone, leaving a sense of scandalized disapproval. He understands that he has blundered into a Tyrenni mind-field. Well, at least there is some sort of reality here. Encouraged, he tries again. “Tivonel?”

For a moment he thinks he is rewarded—the image of winds comes again, he hears merry coral laughter. But it does not hold, it splinters and dissolves into an Earthly street scene; he sees a red VW pull away, revealing a cream-colored Continental. Next instant he is at his familiar desk, then a quick flash to his old body stretched out in his home armchair.

Oh god: Hallucinations. This place must be psychogenic in some way, he can feel illusory powers. Will he lose himself in fantasies or go mad from sensory deprivation?

Pulling himself together, he concentrates outward and tries to shout silently into the rustling void. VALERIE! RICK! IS ANYBODY THERE?

And almost he thinks he feels himself reach somebody, when the most amazing sensation he has ever known invades, or rather, surrounds his mind.

It is a feather-light authoritative presence which seems to press swiftly, gently, irresistibly around the circumference of his whole life-being. The urgency of his need evaporates away and vanishes; indeed, he can no longer even try to call. A myriad frantic half-thoughts of which he had been only dimly aware are suddenly resolved and gone too, folded back somehow into his central mind. His great half-admitted terror of this place drains away, leaving in its place a growing calm. Stealing over him, enfolding him, is an almost palpable wave of reassurance and relief.

For a moment he thinks he is going under some immensely powerful opiate. But that comes from within—this is coming on him from outside.

Fear flares again. Who’s there? he tries to cry, Wait! What are you doing? The only answer is another wave of the calming pressure, in which he can now read a coloring of reproof. Something out there has been offended and is taking steps to quieten him. His mind casts up wild pictures of djinns or angels or extraterrestrial what’s-its, and then understanding comes: Tyree, their techniques of the mind.

Can he be experiencing the ministrations of a Father of Tyree?

Yes, he is sure of it now. He is being Fathered, englobed and “drained” as he had seen it done to others. As if he were an angry child!

Human resentment erupts in him. Struggling to resist the tranquilizing currents he yells mentally, Stop! I must reach my friends! Where are they?

But the pacifying presence is much too strong. He feels his protest dissipate, subside back into itself and melt away. It’s not like going under anaesthesia, not at all. He is perfectly conscious, only calmer, more unified and centered. At peace. Really very pleasant, he acknowledges; these people have the only technology here in the naked realm of mind. What was it Tivonel had told him? Think yourself round, like an egg. Awkwardly he tries that again.

He is rewarded by a majestic sense of approval. Father is pleased, he thinks wryly. Is this what a soothed infant feels like?

Fathering, we call it mothering. What an extraordinary art, why have I not considered its significance before? Surely of all the things people do to each other this is one of the most remarkable.

Into his musings comes a concrete image: the picture of a gyrating cloud of mind-stuff, frantically contorting and emanating violent blasts in all directions, intruding promiscuously into others and on the verge of disrupting itself. He understands. This is how he had been. “Ahura!” The mental echo is freighted with admonition.

Very well, ahura, whatever that is. But what to do? And who is his invisible mentor? As quietly as he can he shapes the question.

He “hears” no reply, but suddenly finds himself recalling big Father Ustan, who had separated him from Ron in the winds of Tyree. At first he takes it only for memory, until something in its insistence tells him it is communication. Dear God, if this is mind-speech, how will he ever learn?

In answer, his surface thought is suddenly invaded by a point that unfolds into a picture or diagram, an abstract multidimensional web-work glimmering in his mind. He puzzles, finally guesses that he is being shown a field-organization, a teaching picture of how to shape himself to function here. But it means nothing to him; he has not the concepts.

For a moment he fully appreciates his barbarous mental state. The Tyrenni train themselves from childhood in all this. Random human exhortations recur to him: Brace up, Relax, Concentrate, Make up your mind, Forget it, Think positively, Cool it, Meditate. How ludicrously inadequate, even the portentous admonitions of psycho-therapy! Here before him are precise instructions on how to organize his mind-self—and he doesn’t know how.

He has no pride left; pride is not the issue here.

Help me, he cries or pleads.

Next second he has an experience so astounding he forgets to be terrified. What he has felt as gentle external pressure becomes suddenly a real invasion—some part of his inmost being is grasped and shifted. He feels moods being seized and compressed, memories manipulated; his very focus of attention suddenly seems to dissolve, to flow in unknown directions and recover itself on some unexperienced dimension. Tensions he was unaware of melt with a snap, events on the borders of consciousness careen about and disappear. It is intimate, clinical, appalling, nothing at all. Beyond description.

He yields. He has no choice nor concepts to define what is happening to him. One last panicky thought wonders if he is going mad or has forever lost himself. Then that too vanishes.

With a twist like a chiropractor’s jerk he finds himself precariously stabilized in what feels like an internal gymnastic pose. His dizzied awareness comes back to him in a ludicrous picture of himself twisted into a pretzel with his heels behind his ears.

“There. Thus.”

He receives the “voice” distinctly but at some receptor-focus separate from his normal center, like an ear held out.

“Speak so. I have assisted you to form a receptor-node. Place a thought here to pass it on.”

Good grief, is this what telepaths do? Feeling like an untrained contortionist, Dann tries to form a thought of gratitude and hold it apart, “there,” at this new center of his mind. “Where are my friends?”

“They are nearby. You are Tanel. A message: You must all join Father Heagran. That way.” A sense of direction imprints itself together with the words, coupled with an impression of stretching or flowing across points.

“Where are we? What is this place?” he tries to ask, but in his urgency forgets the correct procedure. When he recovers himself and goes through the new convoluted channel, nothing answers him. He receives only a sense of disapproving departure. Father Ustan has gone away.

Very well. To go that way. Trying to hold his strange new configuration, he reaches out and finds himself able to flow from base to charged base. As he masters this mode of locomotion, he tries to call or send out as discreetly as he can the names of the others. “Someone from Earth, are you there? Please answer if you can.”

And suddenly, delightingly, someone is here, saying soundlessly at his new “ear.” “Doctor Dann!”

It’s Valerie, he’s sure of it, the warmth, the indefinable flavor of personality. Forgetting composure, he rushes at the touch and is rewarded by a startling buffet of reproof-laughter-drawing-away, coupled with a picture of himself, absurdly shaggy, falling in a bear-hug onto Valerie’s figure.

“Excuse me, please, I’m sorry I don’t know how—” Awkwardly he pulls back, reforming his configuration, terrified that he will lose her.

“Think about just touching hands lightly.” The tiny gentle “voice” comes in his brain.

It is like Tyree all over again, with no body. He tries to comply, and is rewarded by a definite sense of impalpable contact.

“Frodo is here. And Chris is around but he won’t talk. Now we better go. I’ll lead, right?”

“Yes.”

He feels the touch pull or draw delicately, and flows himself with it, marveling. The quality of the contact is Valerie’s but not the same defensive young mind he had known before. Strength flows gently from her, and—something like elation. Leading them through this lightless, soundless, senseless place beyond life she is excited, unafraid. And far more skilled than he. The vulnerability was left on Earth, he thinks. Here nothing scares her.

He flows or leaps along in her wake, exerting all his efforts to hold the contact lightly. Once or twice she checks and changes direction, and he has a fleeting sense of other presences. She must be guiding them around groups of Tyrenni in their path. Or over or under—all directions have the same valence here. How could a disembodied mind know weight?

Preoccupied, he blunders into the outskirts of another mind, a quick bright impression of many words mixed with musics, and an unmistakably hostile laugh. “Frodo!” Trying to transmit apology, he swerves away. His new “posture” is becoming slightly more natural, but he still feels like a man trying to bicycle a tightwire while holding out an ear-trumpet with both hands.

And Earthly questions are waking in him again. What in God’s name is this place? It has physical existence, he is sure of that. They are actually moving. But what and where are they?

As if in answer, another light contact jolts him and a strange word jumps into his mind. “Superconductive circuits.”

Who’s there? He lunges awkwardly for an instant before recalling how to project? “Chris? Chris Costakis?” The absurdity of human names here in astral nothingness.

A cryptic emanation brushes him, flavored with acidity and wistfulness. “Keep moving, Doc.”

It’s gone. So what had been the little man is still here, still his characteristic self.

Dann resumes his progress, pondering. Superconductors? Chris must have “heard” him puzzling over this place, he must be puzzling too. Superconductors are something that happens in extreme cold, he recalls. Currents cycle endlessly. No friction… He knows nothing of such things. Could they in fact be sustained by, be moving among, some such cold circuitry of space? Could a living mind be compatible with such energies? It seems as likely as anything… The words ghost-program come back to him; he thrusts them away. Lost, gone forever, with everything else. Don’t think of her. Keep moving in this unreality, it’s all that’s left.

Without knowing it, he must have sent out a sign or squeak of pain. A firmness brushes him, palpable as a finger laid on his lips. Not human, he thinks. Some passing Tyrenni has admonished him. Anguish is not permitted. Well, perhaps he can learn. He must; there are no drugs here.

Just then he becomes aware of a new extraordinary thing: For some time he has not been in total lightlessness. Out on the edges of his mind he has been sensing something, like seeing at night from the corners of the eye. It is not in his visual system at all, really—but there is something spatial, blurs or presences. Faint swirls, the memories of reflections in dark water; ghostly differentiations too faint to make out except that three of them seem to be moving with him against a background of others. He tries to “look” harder, and they vanish. He thinks of closing his eyes, and slowly they come back: dim, moonlit glimmers, but there. Is this perhaps what they meant by the life-bands, is he starting to “see” life?

Excitedly he tries again and again, failing more often then he succeeds. He is trying too hard, maybe. Relax. Think away. Yes—there they are again, moving with him. What he takes to be Valerie ahead is clearest, if any of this can be called clear. But what happiness to have something like vision again, even in this faint mode!

At this moment she checks and he has to strive away from colliding.

“Look.”

He can “see” nothing, but somehow the space before them seems different, as if it framed or led up to something. And then he becomes aware that he is perceiving: Some sort of pattern is forming like a hypnagogic scene behind his nonexistent eyelids, a hologram in black light.

The bright points—why, it is a picture of stars! And as he attends, the scene recedes, growing, and turns into an image he cannot fail to recognize—a great spiral galaxy seen like photos of Andromeda, in tilted view.

He and the others hover there transfixed, while the transmission changes and unrolls, as Giadoc and Heagran had seen it do at the nucleus. But these are human minds, turned to Earthly modalities.

“P.A. system,” Chris’ thought touches his abruptly. “Probably a lot of them scattered around.”

“Frodo says it’s a transit diagram,” Valerie’s “voice” smiles in the void. “It’ll show an arrow: You are here, take Line L2 for Bethesda.”

And indeed, as Dann “watches,” or experiences the thing, he feels it has a mechanical quality, like a recording. And it seems to resonate from many points, like the abstract voice in a plane. This is your Captain speaking. Have they encountered or triggered some kind of information-post? Is this place an artifact, a ship of some inconceivable race?

The scene is now “showing” the fleet of star-Destroyers spreading their zone of death around the central fires of the Galaxy. Suddenly the memory of a long-ago summer in Idaho surfaces in Dann’s mind. Comprehension breaks.

“Good God, it’s a firelane!”

Feeling Val wince, he modulates down. “It’s a galactic fire-break! If that’s our galaxy. We must be seeing millions of years, speeded up. See that explosion at the center?” He realizes he is transmitting a jumble, half-words, half-pictures, and tries for coherence. “An explosion like that could start a chain reaction, propagate out to all the central stars. Maybe even to the arms. I think those ships or whatever are starting backfires, they’re clearing out a zone around the center to stop the spread. To save the outer stars. But aeons of time, a galaxy—a whole great galaxy—”

He falls silent before the enormity of the thing.

Through Valerie’s touch he can feel the reflection of her wonder. Do they truly grasp it? It’s too vast, I don’t grasp it, he thinks numbly, “seeing” the things, whatever they are, complete their task, form up and speed away. Then the whole scene expands and begins to repeat again.

The four hover before it, hypnotized.

How can they annihilate matter, Dann wonders, without generating worse energies? Do they somehow disperse it below criticality? Are they beings or machines?

Suddenly Valerie’s “voice” says excitedly, “Look! Look at those ones going in ahead. Can’t you feel the life there? I think they’re rescuing life, they’re taking living things off before they burn up. Maybe that’s what we’re in.”

“A rescue squad,” Chris comments tersely.

“Frodo thinks they’re alive,” Valerie goes on. “Like space-fish. Maybe we’re in a whale, like Jonah.” Her soundless laugh is warm in the endless night. “Or in a kangaroo’s pouch… We better move on and find the others.”

Her nonexistent fingers tug gently. Dann tears himself away from the mesmeric image and follows, marveling at her composure. She accepts that they are in a thing. Are they jumping between the electrons of a space-fish? Or hurdling interstellar distances? No way to tell. How big is the structure of a mind? The ancient theologians had been sure that angels could throng on a pinhead. Perhaps he is sub-pinhead size? But he is not an angel, none of them are. We are the miraculously undead, he thinks; joy and pain and wonder and tension live among us still.

They skirt another of the uncanny communicative projectors, triggering it in midscene. As the great galaxy flashes to life in his mind’s eye, Dann muses again on the incredible grandeur of the thing. Beings or machines whose task is to contain galactic fire-storms! Ungraspable in its enormity. Are they manned ships, or could it be instinctive, like great animals? Or maybe devices of a super-race to rescue endangered habitats of life?

His own mind reels, yet the others with him seem undisturbed. He recalls that their Earthly selves read, what was it, science fiction. Galaxies, super-races, marvels of space. They’re used to such notions. He himself had seen the stars as stars; they saw them as backgrounds for scenarios. Well, maybe theirs was the best preparation for reality, if wherever they are is indeed reality.

He is distracted by the faint persistent glimmer of more presences that seem to be moving parallel with them. Two, no, three others are here. An instant later he feels a strong, skillful Tyrenni mind-touch, is electrified by recognition. “Tanel!”

“Tivonel, my dear, is that you? Are you—”

“Tanel, stop, you’re terrible .” Image of coral laughter leaping away. He subsides abashed. It comes to him that he was “sending” in a sort of pidgin, half-human, half Tyrenni words. Will there, incredibly, be language problems here?

It seems so. She is “speaking” again, but he retains only enough of her speech to catch a sense of impending events and the names of Heagran and Giadoc. This last comes through with such joy that he is pricked by a ludicrous flash of jealousy. Apparently the famous Giadoc has been found—of course, he called them here. Now his little friend is reunited with her love. For an instant he chafes, until the ultimate absurdity of his reaction here in this gargantuan abyss comes to his rescue.

It seems they are to go on. But just as he starts, Valerie’s invisible touch checks, and he is jolted by a brush with an unfamiliar, warm complex of mind-stuff.

“Oh Winnie, I’m so glad you’re all right!” Val’s thought comes while he tries apologetically to back away from their contact. He can hear Winona’s transmission almost as if her voice were in his human ears. “Yes, I have Kenny here too, with his doggie. They’re dreaming of hunting. Oh, hello, Doctor Dann! How wonderful!”

“Yes.” He disengages, and finds again Val’s light touch tugging him on through nowhere. As they go on amid unfathomable strangeness, Dann broods on the concept of being “all right,” here between the stars without bodies or proper senses, perhaps inside some creature or machine of the void. Well, the alternative was burning to death in mortal bodies; they have in fact been rescued from real death. Maybe the mind really is all, as he had told himself. Maybe to these telepaths the body is less necessary. But he, how will he get on with his mere human mind as his only resource in this terrible isolation? Rescued from death… a coldness touches him. Are they perhaps truly rescued from mortal death, is this condition to be—don’t think of it.

He is so preoccupied that he almost misses Val’s pull backward, her sense of warning. He stops, but not before he has touched against a hostile iciness—manifestly a barrier.

He recoils onto the nearest sustaining point like a man teetering on a brink. What menace is here? He tries to “look” in his new averted way, and finally achieves an impression of a great swirl of pale energies confined in a pyramidal or tetragonal shape. It is huge, complex, indefinably sinister. And it is apparently their goal; he can sense other lives waiting nearby.

There is a short time of confusion. He has lost contact, but he can feel their lives all about him, and waits, trusting that someone will link up with him again. Presently he feels a vague, cloudy presence, and tries hopefully to “receive” at it. But nothing comes to him.

Then through the bewilderment cuts Tivonel’s mind-send, so clear that it seems to revive his memory of her speech:

“Winds! Can’t you people get into communication-mode at all?”

Communication-mode, what could that be? Another mental gymnastic stunt? A ghostly outstretched hand comes into his consciousness and a human voice speaks strongly in his mental ear.

“Waxman here. Let me help. I have like hands to spare.”

Slowly Dann succeeds in imagining himself clasping the hand, wondering if it is Ron or Rick. As he does so, an odd kind of extended clarity comes into being. He has a sudden weird picture of them each clasping one of the joined twins’ four hands, as if Waxman were making himself into a kind of astral conference hook-up. Is this perhaps literally true? It would be logical, he thinks daftly.

“That seems to be a plant you’re in, Dann. Better get loose.”

He manages to retract himself or shake free from the nebulous presence, without losing Waxman’s grip. As he does so, a mental voice says faintly, “I’ll hang in with Doc here.”

It’s Chris, he’s sure. So shyness continues into astral realms. He imagines his other hand outstretched in that direction, and feels a small, oddly hard touch.

“Ready,” says Waxman’s “voice.”

Next moment Dann is receiving a clear formal transmission which seems to be echoing through Waxman to them all.

“Greetings, all, and to you, Doctordan. I am Giadoc of Tyree.”

So this is Giadoc, lost sky-traveler and late occupant of Dann’s own human body! He seems to be sending in English, too. But there is no time for curiosity, the transmission is going on, part-speech, part-pictures.

“Eldest Heagran and others are with me. We are in what we call the Destroyer.” Image of a great, too-familiar huge blackness, and then in rapid sequence Giadoc’s story unrolls through their linked minds; his awakening and finding Ted Yost, their search for the brain, and Ted Yost’s strange apparent communication with it; then the tale of Giadoc’s own call to them and its consequences. “It came alive as you find it now.”

During the recital Dann is irresistibly reminded of certain eager young interns he has known. A good type. Well, the young belong to each other, even in darkness and supreme weirdness.

He is jerked from his benevolence by Giadoc’s urgent news. “The energies around us are sinking back to death or turning off. Unless we can contact this brain again and reverse its condition we are all doomed. Ted Yost seems our only link. We cannot rouse him. Can you help?”

Before Dann can react, Waxman’s thought comes. “Cryostasis. Maybe it’s packing us up for a trip. Like thousands of years.”

Dann recalls Rick’s tale about the Japanese time-machine. The imagination is still alive in Waxman but it doesn’t sound so fantastic here. Not at all. He now senses, or thinks he senses, a slow but definite ebbing-down of energies around their perimeter. The murmurs of life seem to be slowing, lessening. Is it drawing closer? He shudders.

“I don’t want to be put to sleep for thousands of years,” Val protests. Frodo’s thought echoes her.

“Why did it bring us here if it didn’t want to rescue us?” Winona’s mind asks. The sense of normal conversation is so absurdly strong in this incredible situation; for an instant Dann is back in the Deerfield messhall.

“Maybe it wants to use us as fuel,” Frodo suggests. “Maybe it runs on life.”

“No…” Winona “says” hesitantly. “No, I don’t get that feeling.”

“ Whatever, we have to get through to it before it turns us all off,” Waxman’s thought comes decisively. “Who wants to try contacting Ted?”

“It’s dangerous,” Val comments. “Ted’s a strong dreamer.”

There is a pause filled with almost-speech, and suddenly Chris sends right through Dann, so loudly it makes him resonate: “I’ll try if Doc’ll hold onto me.”

“Right, good,” Waxman replies. “Over here, Chris. Be careful.”

Dann can only marvel at their sense of organization in this weird modality. He feels more tugging, and their misty constellation seems to revolve slowly, until the half-seen life that must be Chris hanging to him converges toward a vague small pallor. Can that be poor Ted’s mind, curled around an isolated node? Chris seems to change balance, accompanied by a tightening mental hand-clasp; surprisingly, Chris’ “hand” feels bigger now, a full man’s hand.

“Hang tight, Doc.”

Dann strengthens the imaginary grip, beginning roughly to understand what is involved here. Chris is proposing to enter a hallucinated mind, perhaps as dangerous as the panic-vortex he himself had experienced. Belatedly, he remembers to cling hard onto Waxman’s grip too.

“Okay.”

There is a sense of he knows not what happening at Chris’ end, and all at once Dann finds himself invaded by a brilliant vision of sunlit tropical waters, streaming foam. The vision comes in fragmentary bursts; through it he manages to maintain his mental holds. But it is hard. Now he is feeling his own body rush through the water, flinging spray from his flanks as he leaps. Good God, is he a porpoise? Hang on. Even though with flippers splashing, he is hanging on through sun and green water and a confused sense of shouting—until suddenly the vision snaps out, and he is back in dark space, feeling Chris’ mind-touch tremble against his own.

“No good.” Chris transmits weakly, like a man gasping. “I couldn’t break him out. He made me into a goddamn fish. The computer screen’s still there, I could see the words NEGATIVE and HELP CANCEL. He won’t look anymore, he’s in heaven.”

A dismayed silence, humming with stray half-thoughts. Then Giadoc’s “voice” repeats clearly, “He is our only link.”

“If we all try to break him out together I think he’d go crazy,” Waxman sends. Other minds agree. “That wouldn’t help.”

They fall silent again, conscious of the ominous quietude creeping closer and closer, conscious of the cryptic fortress of energies so near at hand yet so impregnable. Abruptly Winona’s thought explodes in their minds:

“Look! Look, inside that brain or whatever! Don’t you see?”

What, where? Dann tries to “look” at the thing, loses it, finally gets a focus long enough to see that its interior is now in slow, intricate motion, as if strands of pale, cold light mingled in complex dance. One spot seems brighter than the rest.

“That’s Margaret in there?” Winona shakes them all. “It’s Margaret! I’d recognize her anywhere.”

Margaret?

Margaret, his lost one, here? All at once Dann’s human life comes pouring back through him as if an inner dam had broken. The bits and pieces he has been idling with suddenly fall together, making overwhelming order.

The great black shape that swallowed her, the Destroyer, that’s where they are. She fled into this. Is it possible she’s still alive, in whatever mode of life this is, is she trapped in there?

He focusses with all his might in the crazy indirect way he can “see” here. That bright spot. Can it be the very flame, the life-spark he had followed so desperately? Yes! Yes—it is she! He is sure.

Without thought he gathers his strength as a man might take a deep breath, drawingunknowingly on all the lives around him, and hurls a mental cry at the Destroyer’s wall:

“MARGARET! MY DARLING, I’LL HELP YOU!”

He falls back, hit by a sense of stunned disengagement.

“Don’t do that again,” comes Waxman’s distant “voice.”

But someone else is exlaiming, “Look! Look!”

Dann’s attention is all on the cloudy pale fires within. The star that he knows is Margaret seems to be drawing nearer to him.

“He reached it.” Val’s “hand” touches him. “Let him try again.”

“All right.” Waxman’s phantom hand comes back too. “But take it easy this time, Doc.”

Trying to modulate himself, Dann grasps at their tenuous touch.

“Margaret! It’s Dann here, Doctor Dann. Can you speak to me?”

More silent swirlings, the starlike point brightens. But no sense of thought or word comes. Instead, as it had done for Ted Yost, an image seems to rise and glimmer in his mind. He recognizes it incredulously—Margaret’s computer screen. Oh God, is this her only mode of communication here? He tries to bring it in focus, tries also to maintain contact with the others. Do they see it too?

Pale blue letters come to life on the ghostly screen:

/ / DOCTOR*DANN*IS*THAT*YOU/ /

“Yes! Yes!” he projects eagerly.

But the letters have changed, grown huge and ominous. They march across the screen, repeating meaninglessly:

—I MUST FOLLOW—I MUST SEARCH—I MUST FOLLOW—I MUST SEARCH—as though a vast mechanical voice is intervening.

“Margaret!”

At his cry the letters break down to normal size.

//DOCTOR*DANN*YOU*WON’T*HURT*ME*WILL*YOU//

“No, never my dear! Never! Tell me what to do!”

But the silently booming symbols are back, filling the screen. —I MUST FOLLOW—I MUST SEARCH—I MUST FOLLOW—

“Margaret! Margaret, tell me how to help you!”

—I MUST FOLLOW—I MUST SEARCH—I MUST—

Desperate, Dann pulls on the strengths around him.

“MARGARET!”

Again the normal screen comes back.

//CANT * TURN * OFF * NEED * MORE * STRENGTH// I * WILL * OPEN * WAY * IN * JUST * YOU// And then her words are swept away by the maniacal huge intruders:—I MUST FOLLOW—I MUST SEARCH—

He senses she has spent all her strength. The next move is up to him.

“I’m going to try to get to her. She said she can open it. Waxman, can you hang onto me somehow?”

“Right.”

Dann has no idea what to do, but he hurls himself across the cold chasm right at the brightness glimmering through the Destroyer’s nucleus. The contact with the wall is horrible, he shrinks and convulses like a soft thing dropped on fiery ice. But in the midst of his pain he feels it—a chink or opening, no more than a small weak spot in the terrifying surface.

Is he to go in that? Yes—because Margaret is trapped in there, he must reach her. But how? Savingly the thought comes to him that he is not a mortal man to be frozen or crushed; he is not more than a pattern of energy seeking to penetrate some resistance. He must, he will flow in somehow. Hold the thought: he imagines the inflowing of safe, fearless, mindless electrons. Flow in, go.

But as he knows he has started in, human imagery comes back and he is a man plunging his frightened arm, his head, into deep fanged jaws that have swallowed his child. Reach, stretch, get in! And the jaws become a frightful glacial crevasse squeezing him with icy menace, about to crush out his life. Still he persists, thrusts himself forward tremblingly, and the image becomes mixed with another; he is crawling through a perilously frail dark tube, a frightened astronaut squirming through an umbilicus to the haven of some capsule. Get on, crawl, squeeze, go.

He feels totally alone. If anyone is holding some rearward part of him he cannot sense it. Scared to death, he curses at himself for a coward. Damn you, Dann, Go on.

Just as his last resolve is failing, with astounding reorientation he or a part of himself is through. His bewildered senses emerge into a swirl of dark light, of power-filled space in which he can half-see a panorama of stars against which are unidentifiable things. He checks, remembering that he must not thrust through wholly but leave himself stretched back toward whatever help may be there.

“Margaret? Margaret!”

And then the starlit place comes alive and he sees her, or what is left of her. For an instant a child seems to be peering at him, a dim elf with huge eyes. “Margaret?” Wait—beyond is another, he sees against the stars the beautiful remembered profile, immobile, eyes hooded: goddess of the night. And now another is near him, brighter than all—a familiar white-coated form, with her arms outstretched in tension. The dark hands are brilliantly visible, grasping what seems to be a gigantic busbar. The fingers are clenched, the arms strain to break open the points.

He understands; she or some part of her is trying to change the controls.

“Help,” a ghost whispers.

His being surges in response, his own imaginary hands reach out to close over hers upon the switch. But his dream-fingers have no force, they pass through hers like smoke.

“No use. Not that way.”

Oh God, he doesn’t have the power. He understands; this is real, this is solid matter in the actual world, before which he is no more than a sighing ghost. She alone has that power here. How can he help her? He would give her all his life, but how?

For a moment his senses quest in helpless frustration. Then abruptly he encounters the one thing he knows—a human wound of pain and need. Here! And his arms seem to grip a straining waist, in a rush he knows he can exert his own small gift, can take to himself her pain and fear and send her out his strength.

It is dizzying, transcendent, transsexual—he hugs, tugs recklessly, opening his very life to her need, pressing himself into her, giving himself to convert to the power of her grip. And for an instant he thinks they have succeeded: her visionary arm brightens, the fingers seem to strengthen, the switch yields imperceptibly.

But no—it is not enough. And he can barely hold. They must have more.

“Help! Help us!” he shouts back through his whole being, hoping that someone is still there to respond, unaware of the tremendous vortex of need that he is generating.

And just when he can hold no more, help comes; surging up through him like a violent sharp wave washing through to the nexus where he holds her, to the crucial point where she holds the unknowable. It’s intoxicating, a renewal of life mingled of human and Tyrenni essence intertwined. He guesses dimly that a great chain must be forming behind him, a desperate linkage of life pouring their strengths through him to the brittle point where her power can actually move and break the will of the Destroyer.

The intolerable strain mounts, individual consciousness is lost. All is focussed on those dream-fingers that control real force. Is it too much, will the dream-hold break? What powers of beast or machine is she pulling back, what cosmic circuit is she trying to thwart?

He does not know, but only throws his life into her struggle. He feels himself the apex of a frail chain of tiny lives trying to wrest control of something horrendously alien and vast, as if a living cobweb-strand should try to hold back the take-off of a mighty engine of the stars.