He had wakened then briefly, tossed and turned, and drifted off again . . .
To even worse horror.
Now he dreamed that he was his other self, Replicate 5160, at the strange tachyonic station to which he had been transmitted. But his form was no longer human. He had been edited, transformed into a thick metal block, unable to move. He understood at last— attempting to shudder, and failing—the silvery girl's abhorrence of the form into which her own body had been recast to survive in an oxygen atmosphere. His case was worse. He was a chess piece in a three-sided match; he stood on a queer triangular game board, a hapless piece in a game that FARLINK played against two terrible opponents.
One opponent was a bright thing of lambent white flame, writhing and twisting and flickering, without any ordered shape. The other was equally shapeless; but black instead of bright. They reached across the board with curling tongues of bright fire and terrible empty blackness, as if to move their pieces; but Ben Line could not see their pieces, only the ones on his own side. One was the pseudogirl Venus, her silver body frozen rigid. Another was Zara Doy, alive and moving but imprisoned under a bell jar, pale and gasping, agonized for air. A third was Doc Chimp, a lifeless figure in brightly painted metal like a cheap child's toy, holding out a tin cup. The pieces moved, or the board itself moved them, responding to FARLINK'S rapped electronic orders; but FARLINK was losing the game. Most of its triangular spaces were already empty. The last move had isolated Ben Line, far from his companions. A fluttering tentacle of icy blackness stretched out toward him, and he knew that it was going to remove him from the board and then the game would be ultimately, irretrievably lost . . .
"Ben Line," chimed the voice of the silvery girl, "where are you?"
He came back to the reality of the orbiter and the screen. "Sorry, Venus," he muttered. "I was thinking about . . ." His voice died out, but hers picked up the thought from him:
"About that other Ben Pertin? About Replicate 5160? About all those others of you, Ben Line?"
He nodded. There had been no other signal from the copy of himself sent back along the tachyon trace to whatever that galactic source of interference had been: one more dead Pertin, he thought; the Universe is getting seriously polluted with my corpses . . .
He sat up abruptly and realized FARLINK was still methodically scanning the surface of Cuckoo for a signal that did not seem to be coming. He sighed and reached from the console to terminate the program—
And at that moment the screen lit up:
"STAND BY! FREQUENCY DETECTED! NO COMMUNICATION AS YET!"
And while his fingers were still poised over the console he heard it. There was no doubt.
On the emergency frequency.
Zara's voice.
And the words:
"Help! This is Zara Doy Gentry calling! Help! Please! Help me!"
In the wrecked survey vessel on the surface, Ben Yale Pertin heard Zara's voice repeated from the orbiter. That voice had traveled nearly half a billion miles, round trip, to get to him, but on the instant flash of tachyon transmission it had taken less time than was measurable. The time the message had taken to travel from the speaker on the satellite to the microphone three yards away that had picked it up was longer than the time for the message to fly on the backs of tachyons through space.
He burst out of the vehicle, limping and rubbing at his bandages, but traveling as fast as ever he had moved in his life. He was not in pain now. He had been steadily doping himself with pills and salves from the medicpac; he was no longer quite sober or sane. Although the pain of the ulcers under the bandages was blocked, the effects of the blocks were shaking the stability of his mind. All things seemed possible. The entire Universe seemed ready to meet his commands. He scrambled through the undergrowth toward Redlaw and Org Rider, shouting, "My wife! She's in danger! We've got to help her!"
FIFTEEN
Org Rider way too full of mourning for the loss of Babe to feel any great concern about the dying stranger's excitement—until Redlaw translated some of what he said.
"I do not understand all," Redlaw said, "but it is a woman of his people and she is a captive of the Watchers. I expect they will eat her," he added, moodily stroking his cleaver. "He wishes us to save her. And he says, too, that if we do this a great ship of his people will come to battle the Watchers for us."
Redlaw paused, uncertain. "I do not know if he is telling the truth," he said. "He is a dying man. Perhaps he has the madness of the dying?"
Org Rider shrugged, but he was thinking about what Redlaw had said. With Babe gone, he was not happy enough to care much about danger. And the woman die stranger spoke about. If she was the one he had seen so briefly as she dashed herself into the treetops—but was that possible? could she have survived that nightmare plunge?—no matter; if it was she, there had been something about her that had appealed powerfully to him.
He said mournfully, "What does it matter if he lies? Let us do as he asks. Where is this woman?"
Redlaw scowled and gestured down the slope of Knife-in-the-Sky. "He says he knows precisely and will show us. But how can he travel? I have seen men before, eaten alive by that blue slime. They do not travel through the jungle! But he is doing it. It is something in those cloths he puts on his ulcers, perhaps, or in those small things he eats and drinks from the metal box. I wish I knew—" Redlaw gazed doubtfully at Ben Yale Pertin, still shouting and gesticulating at them to hurry. "And there is so much more he says that I cannot understand."
"No matter," Org Rider said. "Let us save the woman. For him," he added politely, as an afterthought.
Even so, they were far too slow for Ben Yale's liking; and then the trek through the jungle was longer and harder than they had expected, more than two thousand breaths, because Ben Yale insisted that they wait for him. He chose to carry some great metal thing from the ship that he called "bazooka." It was a wonder he could move at all, even without that weight. Beneath the stained bandages—though he had replaced them just before they left—the blue slime oozed out, always spreading, always etching new ulcers into his flesh. And it was a constant peril to be near him in his clumsy lunging through the trees. A single accidental touch of the blue slime might have meant death for either of them.
But the two thousand breaths were over, and in time they reached a point where they could see the distant black gleam of the tiny lake. There on the far shore loomed the mottled hulk of the Watcher vessel.
Org Rider wished for the far-seeing glasses, but of course they were no longer safe to use: Ben Yale had touched them. He squinted across the lake. With mounting excitement he saw: yes—there she was! The very girl he had seen. Wrapped like the prey of a cord spinner in the golden coils of the Watchers' device, lying helpless on the blinding white sands of the little beach.
Even so, even at that distance, she was beautiful. Disordered as her hair was, it had the reddish glint of far lightning. Something about her made him think of his brother's wife. Yet this girl was more beautiful by far, in spite of the drained pale cast of her face and the terror in her expression.
He glanced at Redlaw, and started to move toward the lake.
The giant stopped him.
"Wait!" he rumbled. "Ben Yale says he has a plan. He says that this 'bazooka' is a weapon. He wishes us to go around the lake, to be ready to attack the Watchers from the forest. He says from here, with this weapon that he has carried, he will destroy the Watcher ship. When he has done that, we are to kill those who survive with his weapon and"—he patted his cleaver—"this one!"