"Course, preacher," the boy said politely. "You mentioned goodies?"
Andy Quam wanted to say more, but restrained himself. As a Monitor of the Companions of the Star he had been well drilled in the basic principles of the symbiosis, but as a matter of fact, he realized, he had never heard them questioned before. In Galaxy 5, in the far worlds where most citizens were nonhuman and had no interest at all in his views, in school where everyone nominally, at least, shared the same services on Starday, even among the dedicated scientists of Exion Four, there had been either no dissent or no interest at all. Perhaps he'd got a bit rusty.
But he hadn't thought, not for one second had anything in his experience prepared him to think, that here on the birthplace of the human race there would still be opposition to the Star! No wonder Molly Zaldivar had had to send for him for help. If these boys were representative, Earth had no interest in the wide universe outside.
While the boys were munching the treats the flyer had produced from its stores, transparent green jellies that pulsed warmly as they were chewed and filled the mind with a thrilling montage of synthetic sensation, Andy Quam said diffidently, "But not everybody's like you, are they? I mean, Molly Zaldivar's in the Church of the Star. And so must others be, to justify that church over there."
"Oh, there's plenty branded cattle of the Star," Rufe said chattily, pulling a bit of jelly from between his teeth. "That's what my dad calls them. But Miss* Zaldivar doesn't go much. Sometimes she teaches Star-day school, but not lately, far as I know."
"Anyway, that church is pretty old," said the tallest boy. "I expect it had a lot more people years ago. And besides—sweet Almalik!" he cried. "Look there!"
The first thing Andy Quam thought was that the boy had evidently had more to do with the Church of the Star than his father really approved of, using the name of Almalik to ease his emotions. The second thing was that that didn't matter. The boy's face was suddenly stark and afraid. Quamodian whirled, to face where the boy was pointing.
And then he saw it, something that violated the sweet peace of that Starday afternoon. He saw a great rope of fire, which seemed to extend from the blinding red disk of the setting sun—which had a sudden dreadful resemblance to Cliff Hawk's rogue. He saw it coiling like a monstrous snake of fire in that serene blue sky, thrusting savagely down through the white tufts of cumulus that drifted toward the mountains.
"Preacher!" cried Rufe, scared. "What is it?"
But Quamodian did not know. It looked almost like the plasma effector of some transcience intellect, except that it was too enormous, its white blaze too painfully bright.
Like a snake of fire attacking from the sky it coiled and struck, recoiled and struck again, recoiled and struck three times into those low, far hills. Then it withdrew, sucked back into the setting sun.
A thin column of dark smoke rose from the shallow gap where it had struck. Presently an immense dull booming, like far thunder, rumbled out of the sky. The vast deep sound rolled away, leaving the valley bathed again in the sunlight of the serene Starday afternoon.
"Preacher, what was it?" demanded one of the boys, but Andy Qua-modian could only shake his head. Then his eyes widened, his jaw dropped.
"Those hills!" he cried. "Isn't that where you said. . ." "Yes, preacher," whispered the boy. "That's where the cave is. Where Molly Zaldivar is right now."
9
That distant voice was still whispering to Molly, though she couldn't quite hear it, couldn't quite make out what it said or who it was that spoke. But it was a terribly pained voice, the sound of a mind in rage and agony.
Cliff Hawk kept talking to her, demanding that she leave, harsh, even threatening, warning her that there was danger here. "Of course there's danger," she cried suddenly. "Why do you think I came? I want you to stop!"
He sighed and looked at her. His face, she saw, was terribly lined. Young, strong, quick, he had come in the last few weeks to look unen-durably old.
"You want me to stop, and you don't even know what I'm doing," he said.
"You can remedy that."
He looked away. After a moment he turned to the violet-lighted globe and studied it, still not speaking. Then he said, "We're searching for intelligence. For minds anywhere not in transcience contact with in-tergalactic society. The Reefer and I have built our own equipment-very sensitive equipment. One contact turned out to be the hysterical mind of a small human boy, lost in the wilderness of a new planet out in Galaxy 9. But the strangest contacts are the rogue stars. . ."
"What's a rogue star?"
He probed at the dried blood beside his nose, thoughtfully. "Solitary sentient stars," he said. "They don't belong to the civilized community. Most of those we've picked up—all of them, maybe—are at enormous distances outside our own galactic cluster. Yet somehow—" he hesitated, shrugged. "I don't know why. Most of them seem angered or alarmed when they sense us. But there's one, out beyond Exion—" He stopped.
Molly Zaldivar shuddered. She tried to remember something, but it was outside the reach of her mind.
Cliff Hawk was lecturing now, his eyes fastened on limitless space. "Thinking machines are all alike. Whether they are human brains or fusorian committees or sentient stars or computing robots, they all possess certain features in common. All thinking things have inputs—from sensory organs or tape readers or sensitive plasmas. They all have data storage units—magnetic cores or neurone cells or spinning electrons. They all have logic and decision units—synaptic or electronic or transcience patterns. They all have outputs—through motor organs or servo machines or plasma effectors."
He stopped thoughtfully, seeming to listen to the drone of energy fields and the distant scream of the power tube.
"Go on, dear. How do you tell a rogue star from a lost boy?"
Cliff Hawk hesitated, as though trying to relate the girl's presence to what he was talking about, but she urged him on with a gesture. "Our steady state universe is infinite," he said. "Truly infinite. Endless. Not only in space and time, but also in multiplicity." The worry and resentment faded from his worn face as the theory absorbed him. "The exploding galaxies called quasars were the first proof of that—galactic explosions, resulting from extreme concentrations of mass. Space is distorted into a curved pocket around a dense contracting galactic core. When the dense mass becomes great enough, the pocket closes itself, separating from our space-time continuum."
He was in full flight now. Molly heard a distant sighing, remembered the sleeth and shivered. Was that fearsome creature still lurking about? But she did not dare interrupt him.
"The visible quasar explosion," he droned on, "results from the sudden expansion of the remaining shell of the galaxy, when it is released from the gravitation of the lost core. Each lost core, cut off from any ordinary space-time contact with the mother galaxy, becomes a new four-dimensional universe, expanding by the continuous creation of mass and space until its own maturing galaxies begin shrinking past the gravitational limit, budding more new universes."
From the cave mouth blood-colored dusk seeped in, mingling with the violet hues of the aurora. It was growing hard to see. Molly stirred restlessly, stifling a sigh.
"But the rogue stars," said Cliff Hawk, "are in our universe. Or we think they are. Or. . ."
"Or you're talking too much," rumbled a new voice, and Molly Zaldivar spun around to see a great bear of a man, wearing a dirty yellow beard, peering in at them from the cave mouth. In the red gloom he looked menacing. But far more menacing still was the great, restless bulk of the creature beside him. The sleeth.