The great Plan cruiser, dancing in the thrust of its reactionless motors, slowed, halted, kissed the seared rock, and came to rest in the shadow of a silvery dome that reached out toward the Sun with the barrels of telescopes and pyrometers, stared toward it with the great blind eyes of radio telescopes and masers. Over its entrance blazed the sign:
THE MIGHTIEST REWARDS THE MOST FAITHFUL
General Wheeler laughed sharply. "Faithful to whom, eh? To me, Gann! Trust in me!"
Boysie Gann glanced at him without expression, then at Sister Delta Four. She was mute and uncaring, her eyes hidden in the folds of her dark cowl. Gann shook his head but said nothing. In his heart he thought: Mad. He's as mad as the Machine.
Tubular entranceways were groping slowly toward them from the dome, found the airlocks of the cruiser, met and sealed themselves.
The hatches opened.
Gann stood up. "Let's go. All of us. I ... I don't know what we'll find."
He waited and General Wheeler stalked past him, elbows and knees stiff as the linkages of a reciprocating engine. Sister Delta Four approached the lock, then hesitated and looked at Gann.
She threw a series of tonal symbols at him, her voice crisp and pure as bells.
Gann said hesitantly, "I ... I don't understand. As you said, I'm only about half educated. Something about a ... a man? A relative?"
Sister Delta Four said in English, "I asked you to be careful, Major Gann. There is a brother here who is of unstable emotion."
"I don't understand," said Boysie Gann. The girl did not answer, only nodded remotely and passed on into the entranceway, into Terminator Station Seven.
As Gann followed her he heard General Wheeler's rasping roar, "Hello there! Anyone! Isn't anyone here?"
The general was standing atop an enameled steel desk, peering around in all directions. Behind him were banks of electronic instruments, arranged in long rows like lockers in a gymnasium; they purred and hummed and flashed with lights, ignoring the presence of the general. The desk itself was part of a small office suite. It was deserted.
"I don't understand," rapped the general. He climbed down, picked up a phone from a desk, and stabbed circuit buttons at random, listened briefly, then flung it down.
"There's no one here," he said, brows gathered in irritation and anger. "A joke? Would this Starchild dare joke with me?"
Gann said, "What about the rest of the station, General?"
"Search it!" barked the general. "You too, Sister! There must be someone! The doorway to the Reefs-the key to the Togethership-Iwill not let them escape me!"
Gann looked forebodingly at Sister Delta Four, but she did not return his gaze. Obediently, her fingers telling her sonic beads, she chose a doorway and entered it, her dark cowl moving as she scanned the rooms beyond for signs of life. Gann shrugged and selected an area of his own and began the search.
He could hear General Wheeler's angry shouts, and the purr or whine or click of the -automatic machinery of the observatory, keeping its instruments pointed at selected areas of the Sun, tabulating the results. He could hear the distant whine of pumps, the sigh of air in the vents. There were no other sounds. The observatory seemed to be deserted. Gann moved through a chamber of record storage, where stacked drawers of magnetic tape reels held the information gleaned from countless machine-hours of solar study, glanced into what might have been a recreation room, found himself in the main observation chamber.
No one moved. No voice challenged him.
"Hello!" he cried, echoing General Wheeler's fading voice. There was no answer.
The normal complement of a nearly automatic station like this one was small—half a dozen men, perhaps even fewer. Yet it was hard to believe that some disaster had overtaken them all at once. . .
Or so Gann thought.
Then, turning, he saw the disaster.
There were three of them—three men, piled like jackstraws behind a work desk, before a closed and locked door. They were unmistakably dead.
The one on top, supine, sightless yellowed eyes staring at the ceiling, was a grizzled older man in the uniform of a Technicaptain. Of the other two Gann could tell little except for their insignia—a Techtenant and a cadet, one plump and young, one young and oddly familiar.
Gann bent and touched them. There was no pulse. No breath. Yet the bodies still seemed to be warm.
Perhaps it was only his imagination, he thought. Or the warmth of the room—cooled by the circulating refrigerated air from the pumps, yet still so close to the blazing Sun.
He heard a faint sound, and jerked his head up, frowning, listening.
It was not one sound. There were two. One he identified—the faint tones of Sister Delta Four's sonic beads. In her own search of the dome, by some other route, she was coming near.
But what was the other sound? It seemed to come from nearby, though muffled. He turned his head and stared at the locked door. Could it be from behind that? It seemed to be a sort of closet or record-storage chamber. It was massive, and the locks that held it would not respond to any unauthorized key. Yet now he was sure of it: there were sounds behind it, sounds like the distant murmur of life.
Sister Delta Four entered the room, saw him, hurried over to stoop swiftly over the three bodies.
When she looked up her eyes were dark. She sang. "You need not fear him after all, Major Gann."
Boysie Gann blinked. "Fear whom?"
"The brother," the girl intoned. "He is dead. His un-Planned emotions need not concern you any longer."
"Brother? But—" Then Gann stopped in mid-sentence. Understanding began to reach him. He reached for the body of the Tech-nicadet, turned the flaccid head. The face was one he had seen before.
"Your brother!" he cried.
Sister Delta Four corrected him. "The brother of Julie Martinet. The brother of this body, yes. As you see, he is dead." Her dark eyes were mild and unconcerned, as if she were commenting on the weather.
Beyond the jackstraw heap of bodies the thick square door still hid the source of the tiny sounds, but Gann put them out of his mind. Julie Martinet's brother! He could see the resemblance, the same grave eyes, the same shape of the jaw ... In Sister Delta Four, it completed a perfect oval; in the boy it gave him a strong chin under a dreamer's face.
Boysie Gann saw that, and he saw something more. He bent close, incredulous. But there was no doubt. Under the pallor of death, under the uncaring vacancy of the face, there was a hint of color. Golden color. Almost luminous.
Gann turned quickly to the other corpses. The same!
Like Machine Colonel Zafar, like Harry Hickson, like the beasts of the Reefs, the three dead Technicorps men gleamed faintly, goldenly, like a brass helmet's reflection of a distant sun.
He drew Sister Delta Four after him and sought and found General Wheeler, told him in short sentences what he had seen.
"The same golden color, General," he said. "It's fatal. Or . . ." He hesitated, remembering. Harry Hickson had died of the disease, yes. But he had lived again.
He brushed that thought out of his mind. "Fatal," he repeated. "It's a fusorian infection, I think. If you put a drop of their blood under a microscope you would see little fusorian globules, flickering with golden light. Some sort of symbiosis, Dr. Snow said. But fatal. . ."
General Wheeler rasped, "Fusorian, you say? The Reefs, then! Do you know what that means to me, Gann? It means the Starchild! My information was not wrong. He's here!"
"But he can't be," Gann protested. "We've searched the station, the three of us, and we saw no one."
And Sister Delta Four echoed him, "We saw no one, General. No one at all but the dead."