"What's the matter?" Stan demanded, suddenly uneasy.
"Be soundless! Wait!" Achiever ordered, moving his head from side to side. "Oh, inexplicable event! Do you not feel it? Spacecraft is presently in takeoff mode! Stand still!" Which he himself did not do, but whipped around and sprang to the controls.
Stan felt nothing, nor it seemed did Estrella, but it was true that the lookplates over the control perch were now showing a pattern of motion. Achiever was muttering distractedly to himself, not in English, as he strove with the controls. His hands strained on the great knurled wheels. The contorted muscles of his arms showed that he was using all his strength, but the wheels would not move.
And then a voice from behind them said politely, "It's no use. We've taken over the spacecraft."
Stan spun around. An elderly man who definitely hadn't been there before was standing at the closed door, shabbily dressed, not recently shaved, a short stick in his hand.
Achiever leaped to his feet, and wordlessly hurled himself at the stranger. He accomplished nothing, though: his body passed straight through the other's and he wound up crashing against the wall.
"Oh, hell," the stranger said plaintively, "didn't I tell you it wasn't any use? You can't touch me because I'm a simulation, can't you see? And you can't do anything with the controls because we've got them locked. Your ship has been requisitioned by Wan, and now I have to ask you to step into another room so you'll be out of the way, okay? We won't hurt you unless—oh, I wish you wouldn't do that."
Achiever had rebounded to his feet and was heading toward the simulation again. This time he didn't get that far. The stranger lifted the baton and pointed it at him. Nothing came from the rod, but a bright greenish spark flew out of the hexagonal box, and when it hit Achiever, his arms and legs flew wide, he emitted a screech of pain and crashed to the floor. "See," the stranger said patiently, "you don't want to give us any trouble, because if you do we'll just have to hurt you. Hurt you a lot worse than that, I mean. So just step along, please, and anyway I think we might be going to let you out after we rescue up the others because, you know, there won't be anything you can do anyway."
II
The living quarters were all pretty much like Stan and Estrella's own, except that all the lookplates were off and Salt was waiting at the door. She greeted them with relief and maybe a little satisfaction. "Were in any way harmed? No? Is how they also treated me, except for causing major painfulness. But not you?"
Achiever was busy checking all the doors. Stan answered for them all. "I think Achiever got a dose." He raised his voice. "What about it, Achiever? Did they hurt you?"
Achiever didn't look back. "Extremely yes," he said, then signed for silence as he peered around the corner of the doorway. Then, in his captain-in-command voice: "Salt!"
She turned to confront him. "Yes?"
"Are aware all entrances unsealed?"
She said patiently. "Is true, Achiever, as I verified on first being delivered here. However, do not attempt going through, for same greatly painful event occurring at every time, or worse."
He gave her a skeptical look. "You know this because have self tried? Huh. Nevertheless event is only painfulness, which persons of determination may ignore."
"Not correct, Achiever." She flapped her fingers at him. "In first event, great pain. Second event, pain much greater still. Third event such pain as to cause unconsciousness. Have opinion that fourth time become life terminating, but cannot verify experimentally as did not try after third."
Achiever returned into the room, rubbing his chest muscles indecisively. "But same is only conjecture. How can ascertain same is true if is not attempted?"
"Don't try it," advised an amiable voice from the doorway Achiever had just left. When Stan turned he saw another of those insubstantial and uninvited visitors, this one female. She was conspicuously good-looking, too, and, in a low-cut gown with a diamond-shaped chunk cut out over her abdomen, not overdressed. "The Heechee lady has it right, hon. My name's Sindi Gaslakhpard. You can call me just Sindi. I'm machine-stored like all the rest of us on this tub, so don't get any ideas about jumping us when we aren't looking. You can't hurt us, and we're always looking."
She advanced into the room, giving Estrella a look of curiosity and Stan one of some admiration. "Considering you're all natural, hon," she told him, "you're not so bad. Anyway, I'm here on business. Wan's gonna be on the screens any minute now, and he sent word he wants you to watch so you won't do anything stupid. So Horace's activated your screens, and you better watch. Got it?" She glanced around the four of them like a kindergarten teacher checking her class for washed faces and combed hair, stopping at Estrella. The woman regarded her thoughtfully for a moment. Then, "Hon," she said, "I've been meaning to tell you, you don't have to look that way. If you went ahead and got yourself machine-stored you could get your face fixed." And then, pop, she was gone.
The lookplates all went on at once. Achiever hurled himself at them. If he expected to see the man Sindi had talked about he was disappointed, for each screen showed a different image. Two were displaying curious-looking spacecraft of a design Stan didn't recognize. A third and a fourth displayed individual stars, or different views of the same star, one so brightly hot that its light was almost bluish, the other a lemony-yellow sun not unlike old Earth's. The fifth—
But Stan never got a chance to see what was on the fifth lookplate, because all at once and all together the screens began flashing great gouts of bright green light and emitting a high-pitched scream. The visual display showed nothing but the exterior of one of those odd-looking spacecraft. The Heechee-language jabbering that went with it meant nothing to Stan or Estrella. It did to both of the Heechee in the room with them, though; they were shouting at each other at once. Stan shouted at Salt for attention. "What's happening?"
Salt was actually wringing her long, bony hands. She had to try three times before getting an answer out: "Persons on lookplate speak of happening extremely terrible, possessing danger of terrible devastation. Here! Now! Look at lookplates!"
As she spoke the ship disappeared from all the lookplates. It was replaced by a human face, a face Stan had seen before and almost recognized even before it said its name. "I am Wan Enrique Santos-Smith," it told them—in English! "You people have illegally taken some property which belongs to me. I am talking about the fifty-four kind of human beings, now held in captivity on what you call One Moon Planet of Pale Yellow Star Fourteen."
"Stan?" Estrella whispered. "What's the matter with his picture? Why does it jiggle around like that?" Stan shook his head at her; Wan was still talking.
"I was the one who discovered these people," he said, his tone belligerent. "I want them. So what I'm going to do, I'm dispatching a spaceship to that planet to pick them up. I'm warning you, nobody better try to interfere with my crews, because if these Old Ones aren't immediately boarded onto my ship as soon as it gets there I'm just going to have to punish you. You know what you call Planetless Very Large Very Hot White Star. We've got this weapon that can really mess that star up. I don't mean like a gun or anything. I mean something so powerful that it can make that whole star blow up, and if you don't do what I say it'll do it. If you think I'm bluffing, you just ask your Stored Minds, because they've seen what we did to—What do you call it?" His face disappeared from the lookplate for a moment, then returned. "To the largest moon of Solitary Gas Giant Planet of Small Yellow Star Twenty-Two. If I give the order, the star's going to explode. Then a whole bunch of you are going to die."
And slowly the images faded away.