Library 
It was a situation that held Boone tense, uneasy.
On the one hand, the Helgae domes loomed over the paradisaical flowerland where the sphere-ship lay in strange, silent menace.
On the other, aboard the globe, he could not but chill to the recollection of the monsters.
As for Eileen ... Boone wondered. She had said not a word about their earlier trouble—his desperation-born effort to keep her from making the Titan run; its sudden reversal and her triumph. Yet after the first moments of tenderness and relief at their own survival the clash hung like an invisible wall between them. Out of it, a reserve had come into being—a weighing of words, a wary watching.
Or was that only his imagination?
Regardless, they had to adjust to each other's presence; to work out some solution to their mutual problem.
Cautious exploration finally convinced him that the monsters had vanished from the ship as mysteriously as they'd come. It didn't surprise him; it had been the pattern in every such invasion—nightmare figures materializing out of the void to wreak chaos aboard the IC's Titan-bound craft, then disappearing again, back into whatever dark limbo they called home.
Too, the carrier towards which the dead ensign had been running when the monster seized him was still aboard; apparently the blast-charge had jammed its locks. So there was at least a slim chance for escape.
It was enough for Boone. He persuaded Eileen that, weak as she was, it would be best to stay in her cabin and eat and sleep and rest while they waited for night and stars that might give them some clue as to where they were.
For his own part, he moved from one empty carrier-cradle to another, studying the landscape and the sky.
The effort brought only bafflement. Here and there in the distance, great mountains towered. But always, the blue of the heavens seemed to chop off their highest peaks, as if the sky were a translucent ceiling that they pierced.
Nor could he find the sun, save as a vague, luminous glow that shifted slowly towards the far horizon.
Yet the astrogation microreels showed no satellite or planet short of Venus with an atmosphere thick enough to give such an effect.
Then, at last, the light began to fade. Eagerly, Boone waited for the stars.
Instead, a pitch-black night came down. Only in one tiny spot, almost directly over the fallen globe-ship, could he detect a spark of light.
Then it, too, vanished.
Boone cursed aloud.
But when, once again, he scanned the sky, the spark was back where it had been.
Or was it? Before, the glint had shone cold and blue. Now, it seemed to have a faint orange cast.
He settled down to watching it, as nearly without blinking as he could.
For a few minutes it grew brighter, then faded again till only ebon black remained.
Still Boone held his eyes on the place where it had been.
A dim, greenish glow, so pale he could not be sure that it was really there. Then a pin-prick of undeniable light.
Minutes, ticking by.
A rustle of movement. At his elbow, Eileen said, "Fred, that light—this black—I don't understand."
"I'm afraid I do." Boone rubbed the stiffness from his neck and quit trying to watch the spark above. "We've always thought of the outer worlds as rock and ice. Where this one's concerned, we were wrong. There's ice, all right, but at least in places it's just a shell, with a warm pocket underneath."
He could hear Eileen's breath hiss in the darkness. "Then you mean—"
"Yes. We must have been crossing this planetoid's orbit when the crew abandoned ship. It's too small to have much gravity, but there was enough to pull us in. So we crashed through the ice-shell and landed here."
The girl's body touched his. He could feel her shiver. "Then those lights we see are the stars as they pass above the hole we made? We'll have to go through it again to get back into space?"
"That's right." Boone put his arm about her shoulders. "It shouldn't be too hard. I'm betting this is Hyperion—and that means we are close enough to jump to Titan, even in a carrier. We'll know for sure when it gets light again. I can check the time from sunset to sunrise against the tables that show how long it takes Hyperion to revolve on its axis."
"You make it seem so easy." Eileen sighed. "In a way, I'm not even sure I want to go."
"That has a nice sound." Boone held her closer.
But she twisted. "No. It—it isn't what you think, Fred."
Boone let his arm fall. He frowned into the darkness. "Then why—?"
"Can't you guess?" All at once the girl sounded weary; almost bitter. "There's going to be trouble, Fred. Trouble with Krobis. You know that."
"Oh."
"He won't forget what you did. He'll break you for it. And—and I won't like that."
"You ... won't like it?"
"You know I won't. You—you saved my life."
Boone could feel his muscles tensing. In spite of him, his voice came edged: "Then that's all that's bothering you? You just don't want to see me get in trouble?"
"No, no!—Oh, I don't know!" Eileen's words were suddenly stumbling and uneven. "It's just that—well, you showed me something, Fred, when you tried to stop me. How you feel about me. How my work doesn't really matter to you."
"I see." Boone's mood turned raw and savage. "Maybe you even figure like Krobis pretended he did—that I was just jealous of your assignment when I barged into this business."
"Fred!" And then: "You're trying to hurt me, Fred. I hurt you, so now you want to pay me back."
He didn't answer.
A moment of silence. At last Eileen said, "I—I think I'll go to bed. I'm still awfully tired. That fever...."
Her voice trailed away. Then, after another moment, her shoes whispered on the cradle-plates.
Still Boone stared bleakly out into the darkness.
The whispering footsteps faded, died. He stood alone, in utter silence. Even the murmur of the breeze in the trees about the ship was stilled.
That stillness—it made him frown a little. It wasn't natural, somehow.
As a matter of fact, was anything natural in this weird, ice-shelled wonderland? Even the flowers lacked kinship with those he'd known on Earth.
Or did they?
It came to him in a flash that what he needed now was action. The night, the silence, the bitter disillusion—they'd rasped his nerves in a raw tension. Unless he cut it loose, something would snap.
The flowers, then, could serve as an outlet.
First, he'd get a light-rod....
Pivoting, he strode back along the carrier guides to the hatch ... started to step through.
From the other side came the hiss of a quick-drawn breath.
Boone froze. "Eileen...."
A tremulous laugh. "Fred, I came back. I—I was afraid."
"Oh." He made it curt. "I'm going out as soon as I can find a light."
"I've got one." A beam blazed in the black, half-blinding him. "You're going—out—?"
"Yes. Down onto the ground. I want a closer look at some of those flowers."
It was a belligerent statement, geared for more trouble. But Eileen's tone stayed almost humble: "Can I come with you?"
"If you want to." Boone took the light-rod and, with no further words, led the way down to the sphere-ship's lowest level and out through another carrier-cradle.
Just short of the mouth, he paused. Lowering himself carefully from the cradle-lip, he tested the ground.
It had the slightly spongy feel of thick carpeting, but there was no question but that it would hold his weight. Spraying the light out in a quick arc, he checked for other dangers—of just what sort he wasn't sure—and then helped Eileen down.
Already, he felt better; perhaps even a trifle chagrined at the emotions that had brought him here.
But it wasn't in him to show that now. Crossing to the nearest flower-clump, he spread the petals of a half-opened bud.
They were gigantic—three times the size of any he'd ever seen before. Within the corolla lay half-a-dozen concentric rings of thread-like, sharply differentiated tendrils.
He frowned; spoke half to himself: "Which are the stamens?"
"Or are there any?" Eileen slid a fingernail across the rippling tendrils. "Maybe this is a different kind of plant than we know—one based on six sexes instead of two."
"Maybe." Still frowning, Boone picked another flower to study. Again, as earlier up in the carrier-cradle, he was acutely conscious of the blackness pressing in about them; the utter silence. It brought a queer prickling along his spine.
Eileen brushed against him. "Fred, why can't we let this wait till morning? After all, what do we know about this place, or the Helgae?" There was a tremor in her voice.
"The Helgae?" Stubbornly, Boone shrugged off his own mood. "If they could do anything to humans, they'd have done it when IC started operations out on Titan. As for this place—" He tilted the light-rod up to illuminate the ground ahead.
Its beam stopped short a bare six feet before them, cut off as completely as by a wall.
Eileen clutched his arm. "Fred—!"
Boone whipped the beam left.
Six feet it carried; no more.
Whirling, he pointed it back in the direction from which they had come, squarely at the sphere-ship.
But there was no ship; or if there was, the light-beam could not reach it.
Panic gripped Boone—the black, surging panic that roars up in a tidal wave when Man stands face to face with the unknown. Dimly, he knew that Eileen had swayed against him; that instinctively he'd thrown his arm about her. That was all.
Yet in spite of it, now, he forced himself into striding forward—one creaking step ... two ... three....
The light-beam shortened with each step.
The truth dawned on him, then: The beam stopped short as if cut off by a wall ... because, indeed, a wall had risen up before it!
A dull, translucent wall of silvery grey.
Numbly, he lanced the beam skyward.
There, too, it broke on the grey shell.
Boone's panic channeled into fury. He spun about; struck savagely at the barrier.
Blood spurted from split knuckles. The wall remained.
Twisting, he hurled his full weight against the barrier.
Again, it threw him back.
He straightened, then; swung round the light-rod, searching the shell for some flaw, some weakness.
He found none.
Beside him, Eileen was sobbing. "Fred, what's happened?"
"What's happened—?" Boone laughed, a harsh and bitter laugh. "We're trapped, Eileen; that's what: Trapped in a Helgae bubble like those domes we saw!"
Her tears died. She stared at him. "But the Helgae can't hurt humans—"
"They can't?" He threw out the query like a challenge. "What do we really know about it?"
"But—on Titan—"
"On Titan, we found what we thought was a dead or dying culture. No one's ever seen Helgae alive. Or maybe we have. They're a non-carbon chemistry life-form. The elemental blobs we figured for skeletal structure may actually be their version of organic matter. Our mekronal units could have been smashing the golden age of their civilization, for all we really know."
The girl's face blanched. "No! It can't be!"
"Why can't it?" Her opposition lashed Boone to new fierceness. "Man's never found a way to communicate with any other life-form—not even on our own home planet! We can't talk to ants or paramecium, let alone Martian torglors or Callistan crustachs. But we're egoists, so we've taken it for granted we're the only truly intelligent creatures. All over the system, we've moved in at will, taken what we wanted, because we had the power to do it. But maybe the Helgae are different. Maybe, on their plane, they can think as well as we, or better. Do you think they won't react when the Cartel rips apart their cities and hauls them off by millions for the sake of the mekronal that can be extracted from their bodies?"
Eileen drew back. Her eyes distended. "You're mad, Fred! The Helgae—they'd strike back if they were alive or had the power to think!"
"Maybe they have. Maybe that's the origin of Titan fever, and the monsters that appear aboard our sphere-ships." Boone hammered on the shell that caged them. "Or would you like to deny this bubble, too? Whether it came down from above or grew up from below, it's here—and I, for one, can't break it!"
Eileen's lips were quivering. Her face averted. Her shoulders shook. "Fred—oh, Fred...."
Then she was crumpling. Barely in time, Boone caught her; held her.
What was there in him that made him strike out so at her? Jealousy, as Krobis said? Frustration at their plight here? A projection of the rage he felt towards himself for having been fool enough to leave the security of the sphere-ship to come out here in the black night without decent reason?
Or was it as some forgotten poet had said in a line of verse that he remembered—"For each man kills the thing he loves...."
He cursed aloud.
The night dragged on, with Boone cradling the girl in his arms. There were no more words between them.
Then pale light came, filtered and dim within the grey translucence of the bubble. Eileen roused, suddenly wild-eyed and rigid. "Fred—"
"Easy, girl. We're still inside the bubble." And then, to soothe her: "Don't worry. They wouldn't have taken the trouble to make us prisoners if they'd planned to kill us right away."
She didn't answer.
Wearily, Boone got up and started towards the shell's closest wall.
But as he did so, the ground seemed to come alive beneath his feet. Crackling and crumbling it tilted so sharply that he was pitched from his feet.
Then earth and flower-sod alike were sliding. Loose loam cascaded over Boone. Desperately, he tried to find Eileen amid the welter.
"Here, Fred! Behind you!"
Floundering, Boone craned to see her.
She stood close to the shell's wall, braced against it.
Then another tremor threw him flat; half-buried him.
Clawing, cursing, he wallowed towards the girl.
She darted forward in the same instant. Her hand locked on his. With a final effort he shook free of the clods and lurched panting to a place at the wall beside her.
Another jolt. Again the earth slipped from beneath his feet. Yet now, since he had the wall to brace him, the surge of movement did not fell him.
Then it dawned on him that the shell itself was sliding, sliding upwards!
It was Eileen who gave the answer: "Lean back, Fred! The bubble's rolling, that's all. The dirt keeps sliding forward." Strangely, her voice was steady now; calm, almost.
After that, there was no more time for talking. Faster and faster, the grey sphere careened onward, bumping and bouncing. A dozen times, one or the other of them fell. But as long as they held their places against the rear wall, the earth and clods spilled away from them, so that with sweat and scrambling they managed each time to regain their footing.
Then, at long last, the strange globe slowed and changed direction. The surface beneath it seemed smoother now, and the bubble moved in arcs and curves. Shadows fell across it. The light grew dim, then faded altogether.
More movement, through long lanes of utter darkness. Strange sounds, faint whispers in the stillness.
Then, abruptly, light again—a blaze of it, dazzling and incandescent.
The bubble halted.
A crash of silent thunder, more felt than heard.
Its impact pitched Boone and Eileen forward into the dirt. The globe split into segments like a quartered orange.
Half-stunned, they stared about.
It was a chamber such as Boone had never seen before—a great, bare bubble-room whose very walls radiated chill white light.
Lurching to his feet, he stumbled down from the tumbled earth.
Two steps he took. And then, incredibly, he could go no further, for out of nowhere, a new bubble, crystal clear and barely large enough for him to stand erect, had formed around him.
He spun about.
Like him, Eileen stood in a solitary global prison. Stiff-faced with fear, she gestured to him—helpless, hopeless.
He hammered at the shimmering wall in furious frenzy. But to no avail. The casing gave no more than had that of the cell in which he and Eileen had come.
His sphere began to move away from Eileen's, then. Like a huge ball it rolled, spinning out in an arc that carried it through some unseen exit that led from the chamber of chill white light.
Darkness again.
But only briefly, this time. Then, once more, the globe halted. New light came, a warm and golden glow.
Again, Boone peered forth.
Now he lay in a sort of amphitheatre, it seemed—a bubble joined on all sides by a thousand other, smaller bubbles.
Each lesser sphere held one of the Helgae.
Fascinated, Boone studied them through the clear walls of his cage; and never did man look on stranger creatures.
For their bodies were mottled, shapeless blobs—limbless, with no visible trace of sensory organs. They could as well have been lumps of mud or metal, for all that Boone could see.
Perhaps the men at the Titan base had been right. It outraged human reason even to dream that such things could have intelligent, independent life.
Only then an alien thought flashed through Boone's mind—a thought without meaning, couched in terms no mammalian brain could ever have defined.
Boone groped; floundered.
Another thought-tendril reached him, even less translatable than the first. He felt an uneasiness, a twinge almost of conscience, as if this were a thing that duty demanded he should grasp.
But effort made no slightest difference. Though he strained till his temples throbbed, the concept remained beyond his powers to understand.
Shaking, he gripped his head between his hands.
Now the patterns came in dozens, hundreds. Boone's brain reeled under their impact. He staggered, cried out in helpless fury.
As swiftly as they had come, the alien intellects withdrew.
Weak, drenched with sweat, Boone slumped to the bottom of his sphere.
As he did so, the golden glow that bathed him changed to deepest purple.
Taut, eyes flickering, Boone watched and waited.
Slowly, a new sensation came.
This time, there was no alien thought-projection—if, indeed, it had been that which he had felt before.
Rather, now, the other minds were probing his own brain-cells—searching his cortex with tendrils a thousand times more delicate than Man's finest nerve-ends; wringing out his thoughts as one might squeeze water from a sponge. There was a laying-bare of dreams dredged from the deep subconscious, a draining off of skills and knowledge.
And agony came with it—an agony that rose from soul, not body; a pain that seared beyond all human ken. Through a thousand years it stretched, that pain—a thousand years when seconds lasted eons.
Boone writhed and screamed. At least, he thought he did. For never, never, so long as he should live, could he be quite sure.
Yet he knew, somehow, that, lacking a universe of discourse, the things the Helgae sought most were still locked in his brain. Like him, they could not bridge the chasm that yawned between such different minds.
Then it was over and the glow of purple, too, was fading. The probing minds drew back their tendrils. Boone's sphere dissolved into a place of glorious, delirium-born darkness and he was falling ... falling....
Comments (0)