Roi said, ‘And if it is on the point of accidental death?’

Gan said, ‘We have thought of that, too. We can’t guard against it, but the chances of death following so quickly that you have no time to activate the Station mentally are estimated as less than one in twenty trillion, unless the mysterious surface dangers are more deadly than we expect. . . . You have one minute.’

For some strange reason, Roi’s last thought before translation was of Wenda.

5

Laura awoke with a sudden start. What happened? She felt as though she had been jabbed with a pin.

The afternoon sun was shining in her face and its dazzle made her blink.

She lowered the shade and simultaneously bent to look at Walter. She was a little surprised to find his eyes open. This wasn’t one of his waking periods. She looked at her wrist watch. No, it wasn’t. And it was a good hour before feeding time, too. She followed the demand-feeding system or the ‘if-you-want-it-holler-and-you’ll-get it’ routine, but ordinarily Walter followed the clock quite conscientiously.

She wrinkled her nose at him. ‘Hungry, duckie?’

Walter did not respond at all and Laura was disappointed. She would have liked to have him smile. Actually, she wanted him to laugh and throw his pudgy arms about her neck and nuzzle her and say, ‘Mommie,’ but she knew he couldn’t do any of that. But he could smile.

She put a light finger to his chin and tapped it a bit. ‘Goo-goo-goo-goo.’ He always smiled when you did that.

But he only blinked at her.

She said, ‘I hope he isn’t sick.’ She looked at Mrs Ellis in distress.

Mrs Ellis put down a magazine. ‘Is anything wrong, my dear?’

‘I don’t know. Walter just lies there.’

‘Poor little thing. He’s tired, probably.’

‘Shouldn’t he be sleeping, then?’

‘He’s in strange surroundings. He’s probably wondering what it’s all about.’

She rose, stepped across the aisle, and leaned across Laura to bring her own face close to Walter’s. ‘You’re wondering what’s going on, you tiny little snookums. Yes, you are. You’re saying, ‘Where’s my nice little crib and all my nice little funnies on the wall paper?’ ‘

Then she made little squeaking sounds at him.

Walter turned his eyes away from his mother and watched Mrs Ellis somberly.

Mrs Ellis straightened suddenly and looked pained. She put a hand to her head for a moment and murmured, ‘Goodness! The queerest pain.’

‘Do you think he’s hungry?’ asked Laura.

‘Lord,’ said Mrs Ellis, the trouble in her face fading, ‘they let you know when they’re hungry soon enough. There’s nothing wrong with him. I’ve had three children, my dear. I know.’

‘I think I’ll ask the stewardess to warm up another bottle.’

‘Well, if it will make you feel better . . . ’

The stewardess brought the bottle and Laura lifted Walter out of his bassinet. She said, ‘You have your bottle and then I’ll change you and then—’

She adjusted his head in the crook of her elbow, leaned over to peck him quickly on the cheek, then cradled him close to her body as she brought the bottle to his lips—

Walter screamed!

His mouth yawned open, his arms pushed before him with his fingers spread wide, his whole body as stiff a11d hard as though in tetany, and he screamed. It rang through the whole compartment.

Laura screamed too. She dropped the bottle and it smashed whitely.

Mrs Ellis jumped up. Half a dozen others did. Mr Ellis snapped out of a light doze.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Mrs Ellis blankly.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ Laura was shaking Walter frantically, putting him over her shoulder, patting his back. ‘Baby, baby, don’t cry. Baby, what’s the matter? Baby—’

The stewardess was dashing down the aisle. Her foot came within an inch of the cube that sat beneath Laura’s seat.

Walter was threshing about furiously now, yelling with calliope intensity.

6

Roi’s mind flooded with shock. One moment he had been strapped in his chair in contact with the clear mind of Gan; the next (there was no consciousness of separation in time) he was immersed in a medley of strange, barbaric, and broken thought.

He closed his mind completely. It had been open wide to increase the effectiveness of resonance, and the first touch of the alien had been—

Not painful – no. Dizzying, nauseating? No, not that, either. There was no word.

He gathered resilience in the quiet nothingness of mind closure and considered his position. He felt the small touch of the Receiving Station, with which he was in mental liaison. That had come with him. Good!

He ignored his host for the moment. He might need him for drastic operations later, so it would be wise to raise no suspicions for the moment.

He explored. He entered a mind at random and took stock first to the sense impressions that permeated it. The creature was sensitive to parts of the electromagnetic spectrum and to vibrations of the air, and, of course, to bodily contact. It possessed localized chemical senses—

That was about all. He looked again in astonishment. Not only was there no direct mass sense, no electro-potential sense, none of the really refined interpreters of the Universe, but there was no mental contact whatever.

The creature’s mind was completely isolated.

Then how did they communicate? He looked further. They had a complicated code of controlled air vibrations.

Were they intelligent? Had he chosen a maimed mind? No, they were all like that.

He filtered the group of surrounding minds through his mental ten-drils, searching for a Tech, or whatever passed for such am ng these crippled semi-intelligences. He found a mind which thought of itself as a controller of vehicles. A piece of information flooded Roi. He was on an air-borne vehicle.

Then even without mental contact, they would build a rudimentary mechanical civilization. Or were they animal tools of real intelligences elsewhere on the planet? No . . . Their minds said no.

He plumbed the Tech. What about the immediate environill:ent? Were the bugbears of the ancients to be feared? It was a matter of mterpretation. Dangers in the environment existed. Movements of air. Change of temperature. Water falling in the air, either as liquid .or solid. Electncal discharges. There were code vibrations of each phenomenon but that meant nothing. The connection of any of these with the names given to phenomena by the ancestral surface folk was a matter of conjecture.

No matter. Was there danger now? Was there danger here? Was there any cause for fear or uneasiness?