"It's sentient!" he whispered to the flyer. "I'm sure it's sentient. When neuroplasmic structures interfere with normal energy flow, a star gets that bloated look."
"No data," the flyer answered. "I'm scanning all my stellar files, but observable indices don't identify this star on my complete file of galactic charts. Possible inference: its location is outside the charted cluster."
With a spasmodic effort, Quamodian broke away from the hypnotic glare of that snake-wreathed star. He caught a rasping breath and glanced at the world beneath.
"It certainly—certainly isn't Earth." He gulped at a great lump of terror in his throat. "It looks like we were caught by that billionth chance!"
The flyer hung high above a flat and endless beach. To the north—or was it north—a vast sea lay flat and thick as blood beneath that dreadful sun. To the south—if that was really south—black cliffs rose above the level of the flyer.
That endless mountain wall was curiously sheer, curiously uniform, and curved very slightly toward the sea. Perhaps, he thought, it was an ancient crater rim, a thousand-mile bowl for that flat sea which seemed so dead that he wondered when its tides had ever worn its beaches smooth.
All around the twilight horizon, red auroras played. They writhed and coiled like blood-colored snakes, and struck their red reflections in the glassy sea. They sifted red fire beyond the walling peaks. With an unpleasant start, Quamodian found that he could trace the star's plasma tentacles across that sullen sky, all the way from the polar coronas down to the little misty fingers reaching toward the beach, as if the sentient sun held sky and sea in a visible grasp.
"Lower," he told the flyer. "There's something on the sand I want to see."
Flakes of lighter color sprinkled the wide black beach, taking form as the flyer sank. Gray of weathered metal. Gleam of fading paint. White of naked bone. Dead citizens and their wrecked machines cluttered a three-mile circle of sand.
"I think we've found what becomes of those missing passengers," he said. "Call the guardians and file a report."
"Sir, I've been calling!" The flyer's shrill tone seemed deeply aggrieved. "I've been calling on all the transgalactic channels, with full emergency power. For some reason, I can't get a reply."
"Keep on calling. By the way—uh—how is our power supply?"
"Our emergency power pack is half depleted, sir," the flyer reported. "Shall we land to conserve it?"
"Not yet." He shaded his eyes against the cold red sun, to search that endless beach. "There! Toward the foot of the cliffs. Something I want to see. A little to the right. Those four queer towers. Land as close as you can."
The towers intrigued him. Spaced at the corners of a square, they were half crude masonry, built of unsmoothed rocks laid together with clay. The higher halves were salvaged metal from the wrecks, welded crazily.
As the flyer settled, he discovered a web of cables stretched between the towers: a skeleton cube, outlined in taut bright wire; a second, smaller cube, suspended inside the first with tight wires which themselves outlined six tapered hexahedrons.
"A tesseract!" Wonder hushed his voice. "The essential circuitry of a transflex cube. What would that mean?"
"Relevant information unavailable. Data observable on this planet shows no logical relationship to any system or program of action in my files." The flyer hummed for three seconds and added sadly, "I'm sorry sir. I was not prepared for this."
"Keep trying," Quamodian said. "We've got to reach the Earth and Molly Zaldivar, in spite of—whatever it is!" He glanced at that surly sun and tried not to shiver. "How's the air?" he asked. "Fit for me?"
"Oxygen, thirty-point-seven-nine per cent," the flyer said. "Diluents, noble gases. Helium, neon, argon. Temperature and pressure toward the lower limits of human tolerance. You won't like it, but it won't kill you."
"Thanks," he said. "Open-no, wait!"
An odd little procession came marching down the beach from a black round cave which he saw now above the rubble at the foot of the cliffs. Half a dozen tattered citizens. Three of them robots, badly damaged. Two yellow-crusted multipeds with missing legs. A single human being, leading them all, waving a white rag on a stick.
The human was visibly a woman, in a faded garment made for a larger citizen of a very different race. Her thick dark hair had been clumsily haggled off, and black dirt splotched her visible skin.
Quamodian scrambled out of the flyer, ran a little way to meet her, and paused in wonder. Beneath the alien garb and the grime, she was not only beautifully human. In some way her loveliness was hauntingly familiar. He hailed her breathlessly, in old Earth English.
"Hello . . »
"Stop!" She cut him off sharply, in the universal tongue. "Stand where you are. Identify yourself."
Her voice was brisk and cold, but something in its rich timbre reminded him—reminded him of Molly Zaldivar! That was what had teased his sense of recognition. The likeness sent a chilly prickling down his spine. Scrub off the dirt, replace her butchered hair, put her in human garb, feed her a few square meals, and she would be a dead ringer for Molly Zaldivar.
"I'm waiting." Sternly, she raised that tantalizing voice. "Let's have your standard identification code."
He made some vague, bewildered sound.
"Speak out!" She waved a signal, and the robots darted out around him. "I'm the authority here."
Stammering a little, he recited his universal identification pattern.
"Thank you, Monitor Quamodian." She nodded briskly. "I am also with the Companions of the Star. Senior Monitor Clothilde Kwai Kwich." She stressed the Senior. "What's the date, outside?"
He gave her the universal date.
"Thank you, Monitor." Calculating, she made an appealing little frown that belonged to Molly Zaldivar. "That means I've been here five years—five years too long!"
She nodded at the bloated sun.
"Time's hard to follow here," she added. "Because the day and the year on this planet are the same. The sun never moves in the sky. We can't even count the local years, because we can see no stars for reference points."
Listening, Quamodian closed his eyes. Except for its brisk authority, her rich voice was altogether Molly's.
"Wake up!" she snapped. "How did you get here?"
"I was in transflection transit from Exion Four to Earth," Quamodian said. "With travel priority from Cygnus to answer a trouble call from a girl named Molly Zaldivar." He saw no change in her dark-smudged face when he spoke the name, but he couldn't help asking, "You don't happen to have a twin named Molly?"
"Certainly not. Don't waste my time with idle talk. Monitor, you'd better wake up! We're all facing unprecedented problems here. Every effort must be directed toward their solution. As your superior Companion, I'll require you to cooperate. My subordinates may now identify themselves."
Speaking in unison, the three robots intoned a voice pattern which identified them as traffic safety inspectors. Curiously, all three gave the same serial number. The two yellow-shelled multipeds spoke in turn, but they were both assistant traffic safety inspectors and their identification codes were identical.
"They arrived a year after I did," Clothilde Kwai Kwich explained. "I had been assigned to discover what becomes of the statistically small number of passengers lost in transflection transit. Their assignment was to find what became of me. They entered the headquarters terminal as a team of two—an inspector and his robot assistant. I had been in route to Exion Four, and that was their destination."