THE FIVE HELLS OF ORION-16
503 Words
VISOME HUNDREDS OF LIGHT-years away, the Jodrell Bank was making up lost time on its Betelgeuse run.
Herrell McCray swept the long line from Sol to Betelgeuse, with his perceptions that were not his eyes and his touch that was not of matter, until he found it. The giant ship, fastest and hugest of mankind’s star vessels, was to him a lumbering tiny beetle.
It held friends and something else—something his body needed—air and water and food. McCray did not know what would happen to him if, while his mind was out in the stars, his body died. But he was not anxious to find out.
McCray had not tried moving his physical body, but with what had been done to his brain he could now do anything within the powers of Hatcher’s people. As they had swept him from ship to planet, so he could now hurl his body back from planet to ship. He flexed muscles of his mind that had never been used before, and in a moment his body was slumped on the floor of the Jodrell Bank’s observation bubble. In another moment he was in his body, opening his eyes and looking out into the astonished face of Chris Stoerer, his junior navigator. “God in heaven,” whispered Stoerer. “It’s you!”
“It is,” said McCray hoarsely, through lips that were parched and cracked, sitting up and trying the muscles of the body. It ached. He was bone-weary. “Give me a hand getting out of this suit, will you?”
It was not easy to be a mind in a body again, McCray discovered. Time had stopped for him. He had been soaring the star-lanes in his released mind for hours; but while his mind had been liberated, his body, back on Hatcher’s “planet,” had continued its slow metabolism, its steady devouring of its tissues, its inevitable progress toward death. When he had returned to it he found its pulse erratic and its breathing ragged. A grinding knot of hunger seethed in its stomach. Its muscles ached.
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.
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