THE FIVE HELLS OF ORION-18
741 Words
IN SO SHORT A TIME McCray had come to think of this as life, and a sort of interregnum. He swept up and out, glancing back only to see the ship’s surgeon leaping forward to catch his unconscious body as it fell and then he was in space between the stars once more.
Here, ‘twixt Sol and Betelgeuse, space was clear, hard and cold, no diffuse gas cloud, no new, growing suns. He “looked” toward Hatcher’s world, but hesitated and considered.
First or last, he would have to look once more upon the inimical presences that had peered out at him from the Central Masses. It might as well be now.
His perceptions alert, he plunged toward the heart of the galaxy.
Thought speeds where light plods. The mind of Herrell McCray covered light-millenia in a moment. It skipped the drifty void between spiral arms, threaded dust clouds, entered the compact central galactic sphere to which our Earth’s sector of the galaxy is only a remote and unimportant appendage. Here a great globular cluster of suns massed around a common center of gravity. McCray shrank himself to the perspective of a human body and stared in wonder. Mankind’s Sol lies in a tenuous, stretched-out arm, thinly populated by stellar standards: if Earth had circled one of these dense-clustered suns, what a different picture of the sky would have greeted the early shepherds! Where Man’s Earthbound eyes are fortunate to count a thousand stars in a winter sky, here were tens of thousands, bright enough to be a Sirius or a Capella at the bottom of a sink of atmosphere like Earth’s—tens of billions of stars in all, whirling close to each other, so that star greets star over distances that are hardly more than planetary. Sol’s nearest neighbor star is four light-years away. No single sun in this dense, gyrating central mass was as much as one light-year from its fellows.
Here were suns that had been blazing with mature, steady light when Sol was a mere contracting mass of hydrogen—whose planets had cooled and spawned life before Earth’s hollows cupped the first scalding droplets that were the beginnings of seas.
On these ancient worlds life existed.
McCray had not understood all of what Hatcher had tried to communicate to him, but he had caught the terror in Hatcher’s thoughts. Hatcher’s people had fled from these ancients many millenia before—fled and hidden in the heart of the Orion gas cloud, their world and all. Yet even there they were not safe. They knew that in time the Old Ones would find them. And it was this fear that had led them to kidnap humans, seeking allies in the war that could not forever be deferred.
Hatcher’s people were creatures of thought. Man was the wielder of physical forces—“paranormal” to Hatcher, as teleportation and mind-seeing were “paranormal” to McCray. The Old Ones had mastered both.
McCray paused at the fringe of the cluster, waiting for the touch of contemptuous hate. It came and he recoiled a thousand light-years before he could stop.
To battle the Old Ones would be no easy match—yet time might work for the human race. Already they controlled the electromagnetic spectrum, and hydrogen fusion could exert the force of suns. With Hatcher’s help—and his own—Man would free his mind as well; and perhaps the Old Ones would find themselves against an opponent as mighty as themselves.
He drew back from the Central Masses, no longer afraid, and swept out to see Hatcher’s planet.
It was gone.
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IN THE GREAT GAS CLOUD the tunneling blue suns swept up their graze of hydrogen, untroubled by planets. Themselves too young to have solid satellites, Hatcher’s adopted world removed again, they were alone.
Gone!
It was for a moment, a panicky thought. McCray realized what they had done. Hatcher’s greatest hope had been to find another race to stand between his people and the Old Ones. And they had found it!
Now Hatcher’s world could hide again and wait until the battle had been fought for them.
With a face light-years across, with a brain made up of patterns in the ether, McCray grinned wryly.
“Maybe they made the right choice,” he thought, considering. “Maybe they’d only be in the way when the showdown comes.” And he sought out Jodrell Bank and his body once more, preparing to return to being human ... and to teach his fellow-humans to be gods.
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