"Say, preacher," he hissed furiously. "What the dickens is the matter with you?"
"I don't know." He shook his head unhappily. "I'm sure I don't know."
After a moment he followed the girl into the flyer.
22
The rogue was much larger now, and wiser, and stronger. It sensed that far watcher's anxious observation, but it wanted no defense.
It did not seem much different to the despairing eyes of Molly Zaldivar, for at best it was only a cloud of stripped surging electrons, a controlled violence of particles that would have been her death if the rogue's own energies had not kept its components bound to its central mass. But it had fed and grown. It had assimilated neural reactions from Cliff Hawk, the robot, the sleeth, the hundred living creatures larger than microorganisms that it had absorbed into itself. It was by no means finished with either growing or learning. Perhaps it was almost mature in size and strength and intelligence. Far from mature however, in its understanding of itself.
Molly made no sound as the radiant whirl summoned the sleeth to it, and entered into the black terrifying shape of the predator from space. The sleeth dropped down upon her and caught her, coldly but harmlessly, in its razored talons, now sheathed in their armored cases. It rose with her through the center of the globe, flew through the cold core of that edgeless opal glow and on and out, tracing the endless passageways to the surface.
Molly did not stir. She was past fear or worry; she was not resigned, but she was passive.
She would not have struggled even if she had known how close to death that murderous opal glow had brought her. But she did not know.
She did not respond even in the hues of emotion by which the rogue interpreted her mental state. No green blaze of hate, no blues or violets of fear. No spark of love; emotion had left her, leaving her dark, and empty, and merely waiting.
Bearing Molly Zaldivar in the bubble of atmosphere trapped in the sleeth's transflexion fields, the rogue left the round Earth.
Tardily they dawdled through the "thick" gases that were the solar atmosphere—so tenuous at one A.U. that human instruments could barely record them, and human bodies would have burst and foamed; but still too thick for the sort of speeds that the sleeth, commanded and driven by the starlike energies of the rogue, could develop. Even so, in minutes they were past gassy Jupiter and Saturn; the void was more nearly empty now, and the rogue drove the sleeth more fiercely.
So fiercely that time seemed to stop.
These were not physical energies that the rogue commanded now; they were the transflexion fields of the sleeth and itself. They leaped through empty spaces, through folded light and darkness, through bitter cold and twisting force and giddy deeps of vastness, leaped to the golden suns of Almalik . . .
And were there.
A thin sighing shout whispered passionately in the ears of Molly Zaldivar:
"Observe!" it shrieked, almost soundlessly. "I have begun to destroy Almalik!"
"You cannot," she said bleakly.
"Observe!" it shrieked again, and subsided. It was the molecules of atmosphere itself that the rogue was shaking now, to make sounds that the girl could hear. It could produce little volume, but in the girl's tiny bubble of air, gazing at the twelve bright but distant stars and one nearby the blinding sun that was Almalik, in the middle of the awful soundlessness of interstellar space, there was no other sound loud enough to drown it out, nothing but her own heart and breath and the faint mindless singing of the sleeth.
"I begin!" whispered the tiny scream, and like a hawk stooping to its prey the rogue drove them toward the nearest planet.
It was a small world, less than Pluto and farther from its primary; the horizon was strangely rounded, the surface mottled with creeping blobs of liquid gas.
With a power summoned from its infinite reserves, the rogue seized it, entered it—became it. It grew once more. It fed quickly and avidly, seized new atoms, sucked electrons into the spreading patterns of its being, took new energies from frozen stone. It reached out to survey the space around itself, found ions, gas molecules, a hurtling moonlet—and farther off, a small metal mass inhabited by organic masses of organized matter. The rogue did not know it was a spaceship; did not care.
It drew the spaceship and the sleeth at once to itself. The ship crashed bruisingly on the surface of the tiny world. With the sleeth it was more gentle, but not gentle enough. The creature struck against a spire of frozen hydrates, screamed soundlessly and went limp. And as it lost control, with it went the bubble of air it carried in its transflexion fields, and Molly Zaldivar lay open to the murderous empty cold of space.
For many nanoseconds the rogue considered what it had done. As best it knew how to be so, it was alarmed.
At length it seized upon a buried shelf of rock beneath the frozen gases and shook it to make words. "Molly Zaldivar!" rumbled the planet. "What is happening to you?"
The girl did not answer. She lay cradled in a bed of the planet's—of the rogue's crwn, now—crystal snow, beside the crumpled black body of the sleeth. She did not breathe; there was no longer any air for her to breathe. Dark blood frothed and froze on her face.
"Molly Zaldivar!" groaned the rock of the planet's crust. "Answer!"
But there was no answer.
The rogue tested its powers, felt their new magnitude. Now it was a planet, its coat of frozen gas a skin, its cragged granite mountains the bones, its deep pools of cooling magma a heart of sorts. The rogue was not used to so large a body. It regretted (insofar as it understood regret) that its body was unkind to Molly Zaldivar, too airless, too cruelly cold.
From the wreckage of the spaceship organized masses of organic matter were exiting, clad in metallic artificial skins. The rogue did not recognize that they were citizens who might be of help to Molly Zaldivar; it reached out a thoughtless effector and slew them. And then it again practiced the sensation it experienced as regret; for it realized that they had owned supplies of water and air, warmth and pressure that could have been used for Molly Zaldivar.
No matter. The rogue was now the planet, and could dispose the planet's resources. It would not let her die.
It shielded her from cold, warmed the frozen gas around her and cupped it in a sphere of transflexion forces. With bits of matter taken from the creatures it had destroyed it healed the damage to her lungs. It warmed her stiffened body, helped her breathe again, found the spark of life in her. . .
And the girl stirred and spoke.
"What are you doing, monster?" she moaned.
"I am saving your life, Molly Zaldivar," rumbled the rocks. "I am destroying Almalik!"
"You cannot, monster," sobbed the girl.
"Observe!"
The rogue's transflection field was vaster now, spreading to hold all its continents of dark and ancient rock, its seas of snow, to contain all its great mass.
With all its might, the rogue prepared to strike at Almalik.
It halted the planet in its orbit and turned inward toward that white and splendid single sun, the brightest star of Almalik.
And in its hate for Almalik it drove inward, toward collision with the star.
The sleeth was cruelly hurt; but the creature that had evolved to kill pyropods in space was not easily killed. It stirred. The great empty eyes gazed into space, then bent to look into the eyes of Molly Zaldivar. Ripples of muscle pulsed under the dark, hard flesh. Its transflection fields grew again; it lifted lightly from the frozen gas on which it lay, and its high singing sound grew in volume. The sleeth was not an intelligent creature as man is intelligent, or the other citizens of the galaxies; but it had awareness. It recognized that something had owned it for a time; it felt that the something was gone, now that the rogue had retreated to explore its new planetary body. It remembered Molly Zaldivar. . .