"The other cluster is beyond the nebula,” Dundonald thought. “Come on—"
Going into the Horsehead had been like diving against a solid basalt cliff. This was like plunging into a furnace, into living flame. And they were both illusion. The fires of this bright nebula were as cold as the dust-laden blackness of the dark one. But they were infinitely more beautiful. The more diffuse gaseous clouds blazed with the light of their captive suns instead of blotting them out. Harlow sped with Dundonald along golden rivers, over cataracts of fire a million miles high, through coils and plumes and great still lakes of light with the stars glowing in them like phosphorescent fish.
Then there was darkness again, and another cluster growing in it, another hive of stars patched with the sick radiance of the Cepheids. And Dundonald was sending out a silent cry, and suddenly there was an answering thought, a third mind in that vastness of space and stars.
Who calls?
They followed that thought-voice, arrowing in toward a pallid star that throbbed like the heart of a dying man. And in the sullen glare of its corona they met a tiny flicker of radiance like themselves, a minute living star — one of the old Vorn.
"Who comes?” he said. “Who disturbs me at my work?"
Harlow sensed the strong annoyance in this strange mind, too lofty and remote for anger. He kept silent while Dundonald explained, and the mind of the Vorn kept that remoteness, that lofty detachment, and Harlow began to understand that humanity and the ant-like affairs of men had been left too far behind for this one to care now what happened to anything that wore perishable, planet-bound flesh.
He was not surprised when the Vorn answered Dundonald. “This is no concern of mine."
Harlow's thought burst out. “But the Converter! You'll never be able to come back—"
The Vorn regarded him for an instant with a sort of curiosity. “You are very new. Both of you. Go range the stars for a thousand years and then tell me that these things matter. Now go — leave me to my studies."
Dundonald said wearily to Harlow, “I told you they wouldn't care."
"But they have to,” Harlow said. “Listen,” he shouted mentally at the Vorn, who was already drifting away above the curdled furnace-light of the Cepheid. “Listen, you think of this, the whole wide universe, as your country. Well, it won't be your country any longer if these men gain control of the Converter. You reprove us for disturbing you. We're only two. Millions will come through the Converter, in time. The Vorn will no longer be alone, or in any way unique. Where will your solitude be then, and your peace?"
The Vorn hesitated. “Millions?” he repeated.
"You better than I should know how many inhabited worlds there are in this galaxy. And you should remember how men fear death and try in every way to cheat it. The promise of a physical immortality will draw whole populations through the Converter. You know that this is so."
"Yes,” said the Vorn. “I remember. I know."
"Then you'll help us? You'll lead us to others of your kind?"
The Vorn hovered for what seemed to Harlow an anxious eternity, the pallid fires coiling around him, his mind closed in so that neither Harlow nor Dundonald could read it.
Then the Vorn said, “Come."
He rose and darted away from the cluster, and Harlow followed with Dundonald, and the starstream of the Milky Way whipped by like smoke and was gone, and there was blackness like the night before creation and emptiness beyond the power of the mind to know.
Gradually, as his new and untried senses adjusted, Harlow began to be aware of little flecks of brightness floating in the black nothing, and he understood that these were galaxies. So small, he thought, so terribly far apart, these wandering companies of stars banded together like pilgrims for their tremendous journey. Here and there it seemed that several galaxies had joined in a cluster, traveling all together from dark beginning to darker ending, but even these seemed lost and lonely, their hosts of bright companions dwarfed to single sparks in that incredible vastness, like sequins scattered thinly on a black robe.
The thought-voice of the Vorn reached him, a throb with hunger and excitement.
"In all this time, we have never reached the end—"
The hands of the ape, thought Harlow, and the eyes of man. They had never been filled and they never would be, and this was good. He looked at the distant galaxies with the same hunger and excitement he had felt in the Vorn. What was man for, what was intelligence for, if not to learn? To see, to know, to explore, to range over creations to its uttermost boundaries, always learning, until you and the universe ran down together and found the ultimate answer to the greatest mystery of all.
No wonder the Vorn had no interest in going back. With something of a shock, Harlow realized that he himself was rapidly losing it.
Dundonald laughed, the silent laughter of the mind, edged with sadness. “Cling hard to your purpose, Harlow. Otherwise we too will be Vorn."
The pace quickened. Or perhaps that was only an illusion. They fled at unthinkable speeds, crosscutting time, their bodiless beings making nothing of space and the limitations of matter. They plunged toward a fleck of brightness and it grew, spreading misty spiral arms, and the mists separated into stars, and a galaxy was there all blazing bright and turning like a great wheel. They swept through its billions of suns as a breeze through grains of sand, and the Vorn called, and others answered. There was swift talk back and forth, and Harlow knew that some of the minds broke contact and withdrew again into their privacy, but others did not and now their little company was larger.
They burst free of the spiral nebula. The Vorn scattered away and were gone, to speed the hunt and spread it wider. Harlow, Dundonald and their guide raced on.
There was no time. There was no distance. Like a drunken angel, Harlow plunged and reeled among the island universes, dizzy with the wheeling of stars beyond counting, dazed with the dark immensities between, exalted, humbled, afraid and yet in a very real sense, for the first time, not afraid at all. Several times he strayed, forgetting everything, and Dundonald called him back. And then there was a long last swooping plunge, and a galaxy, and a flickering darkness that was somehow familiar, and Harlow was in a bay on the coast of a great black nebula, and there was a green star burning like a baleful lamp—
Home-star of the Vorn. And from across the universe the Vorn were Gathering.
They danced against the black cloud-cliffs like fireflies on a summer night, and there were very many of them. They coalesced in a bright cloud and went streaming down toward the planet of the green star in a comet-like rush, carrying Harlow with them, and at the last moment he cried out in sudden terror and regret, “No — no—"
But there was a pillar of fire in the night and they streamed toward it, filling the air with their eerie brightness. They brushed the upturned faces of Taggart's men as they passed, and Harlow saw the faces go white and staring with panic.
Then they all vanished in a blur as Harlow spun high, high into the air and flung himself into the shaking glorious pillar. Moth into flame. And his wings were shorn and crumpled and the glory died, and the lightness, and the freedom, as he fell inside that pillar of force. For as he fell, the subtle pattern of its forces was transforming, rearranging, his electrons and atoms back into solidity. He stumbled out of the pillar, and he was a man, he was Mark Harlow again, moving heavily on cement and not knowing why.
He was not alone. Dundonald was beside him — the old fleshly solid Dundonald — and all around them there were others. Tall men whose lean, spare flesh seemed even now to have a certain glow, almost a transparency, as though the long ages in another form had wrought some permanent, subtle change. Their eyes were strange, too — as remote and brilliant as the stars they had followed across the endless void. There was one taller, sterner, more commanding than the rest, and he seemed to be the leader, as perhaps he had been.