But if he came back alive, things would be different. He would be Miles Vander once more. And Marie would still be here.
His time was up. He looked away from Marie and, lifting his head, looked in his mind’s eye out to the alien spaceship.
In that moment, he was there.
He stood in the living room of the suite that he had first entered in the Pentagon. The two aliens stood facing him.
“I’m ready now,” he told them.
“That’s good,” answered the shorter one. “Because time is short.”
He waved a hand at one wall of the room. Miles looked at it or through it—he was not sure which—and saw the sun, changing back as he watched from its red to a normal yellow color, and below it the Earth, blue under that yellow light. As he watched, the blue globe that was the Earth began to shrink. It shrank rapidly, dwindling into the blackness of star-filled space around it.
Abruptly, all space began to move. The lights of the stars lengthened and became streaks. They became fine bars of light extending in both directions.
“Where to now?” asked Miles.
“To our defense line, beyond the spiral arm of the galaxy,” answered the shorter alien.
Even as he spoke, Miles felt a sudden sense of disorientation—a strange feeling as if, in less than no time at all, he had suddenly been wrenched apart, down to the component parts of his very atoms, and spread out over inconceivable distances, before being, in the same infinitesimal moment, reassembled at some far distant place.
“First shift,” commented the taller alien. “At the best we can do there will be five more like that, with necessary time for calculation between.”
It did indeed require five more such moments of disorientation called shifts to complete their journey. Miles came to understand that in that moment of disorientation the ship and all within it changed position across many light-years of distance. But having jumped suddenly in this manner from one point to another, it was forced to stop and recalculate, even though its calculators were awesome by human standards, for a matter of hours or days before it could establish its due position and figure the position toward which it would next shift. All in all, it took what Miles estimated to be something like a week and a half of interior time aboard the ship before they finally reached the defense line toward which they were heading.
They came out not at the line itself but some hours of cruising time away. This, Miles was given to understand by the shorter alien, was because of the safety factor required in the calculation of a shift. For a shift brought them only approximately to the destination they had figured, and to calculate without a margin of safety might mean coming out in the space occupied by some other solid body—with a resultant explosion that would have been to a nuclear explosion as a nuclear explosion is to that of a firecracker.
As it was, it took several hours of driving through curiously starless space before Miles began to pick out what seemed to be a star, a single star, far ahead of them.
As they grew close to this, however, it began to take on the disk shape and yellow color of a sun, like the sun of Earth.
“No,” said the shorter alien, standing beside Miles in the large, almost featureless room with the large screen which seemed to be the pilot room of the aliens’ ship. Miles looked at him. Miles was becoming used to having his thoughts answered as if he had spoken them aloud.
“It’s not a real star,” went on the smaller alien. “It’s an artificial sun—a lamp we’ve set up here to light our Battle Line for us when we meet the Horde.”
“Where’s the defense line?” Miles asked.
“It ought to be in view in a few minutes,” answered the shorter alien.
Miles turned to look at the other. In spite of the change that had taken place in him, and in spite of the fact they had been together aboard the ship now for some days, he had gotten no feeling of response from the two aliens. It was as if they were wrapped around, not merely with human appearances, but with some sort of emotional and mental protective device that kept him from feeling them the way he had felt the people of his own world, as individuals. It struck Miles now that from the first he had had no names for the two of them. They had simply been the taller and the shorter, in his mind, and whenever he had spoken to one, the one at whom he directed his words seemed instinctively to know he had the responsibility to answer.
“What are you people like, in there toward the center of the galaxy?” Miles asked now, looking down at the other. “I don’t think I ever asked you.” The alien did not turn his head but kept gazing into the screen as he answered.
“There’s nothing I can tell you,” he said. “You are, as I said, a barbarian by our standards. Even if I could explain us to you, you wouldn’t understand. Even if you could understand what we’re like, knowing it would only frighten and disturb you.”
A little anger stirred in Miles at this answer. But he held it down.
“Don’t tell me you know everything, you people?” he asked.
“Not everything,” answered the alien. “No. Of course not.”
“Then there’s always the chance that you might be mistaken about me, isn’t there?” said Miles.
“No,” said the alien flatly.
He did not offer any further explanation. Miles, to keep his anger under control, made himself drop the subject. He turned back to watching the screen. After some minutes, during which the orb of the distant sunlike lamp continued to swell until it was very nearly the size of the sun as seen from Earth, he began to catch sights of glints of reflected light forming a rough bar across the lower part of the screen.
“Yes,” said the alien beside him, once more answering his unspoken question. “You’re beginning to see part of the ships, the supply depots, and all else that make up our defense line.”
As they got even closer, the line began to reveal itself as visible structures. But even then, Miles discovered, the screen could not hold any large part of it in one picture. With a perception he suddenly discovered he now possessed, Miles estimated the line to stretch at least as far as the distance from the solar system’s sun to its outermost planet.
They seemed to be moving in toward the thickest part of the line, and as they got close, Miles saw round ships very much like the one he was on. These floated in space, usually with a raftlike structure nearby, and were spaced at regular intervals across the screen.
Miles had assumed that they were fairly close by this time. But to his intense surprise they continued to drive onward at a good speed, and the ships continued to swell on the screen before him. It was some seconds before he realized that the ships they were approaching were truly titanic in size, as large in proportion to the ship he was on as the ship he was on would have been to a four-engine commercial jet of Miles’ native Earth. These great ships were certainly no less than several thousand miles in diameter.
“If you want a word for them,” the alien beside Miles answered his unspoken thought, “you might call them our dreadnought class of fighting vessels. Actually, they’re not fighting vessels the way you’d think of them at all. They’re only vehicles to carry a certain critical number of our own people, who will use their personal weapons on the Horde when the Horde gets within range. Without our people inside it, that ship you see is a simple shell of metal and not much more.”
It was becoming clear to Miles that they were headed for one monster of a ship in particular. He assumed they would be transferring him into the larger ship and wondered what it would be like inside that enormous shell of metal. But instead of coming right up to the dreadnought, they slowed and stopped in space perhaps four or five miles from its surface. At first Miles did not understand this. Then, turning around, he discovered he was alone in the room. His wide-ranging awareness, developed during those last days on Earth, echoed back the information to him that he was now alone on this ship. Plainly, the two aliens had gone to the larger vessel to report or whatever their duty required them to do.