Cliff Hawk blinked and returned to reality. For a moment his gaze brushed Molly Zaldivar as though he had forgotten she was there and was astonished to find her. But then his whole thought was concentrated on the man at the cave mouth.
"Reefer! What's the word? How bad is the damage?"
The Reefer opened a soundless grin between dingy yellow mustache and grimed yellow beard. "Bad enough," he said. "But we're still in business. What happened?"
"I— I—" Hawk glanced again at Molly Zaldivar, "I was just checking in the cave when I heard Molly groaning, and I. . ."
"And you forgot everything else and went to her. Ah, that's to be understood. A pretty face is more than a star to you, of course."
Hawk shook his head. "I've been telling her to go away."
"Beyond doubt. That's why you're lecturing the girl like a child at Starday school, eh?" He patted the great bulk of the sleeth. "We understand, do we not?"
Hawk gazed at the Reefer with mingled anger and apology, then turned to Molly. "I'm sorry," he said. "But the Reefer's right. You've got to go back to Wisdom Creek."
"No! Not until you tell me what you're doing here!"
"Girl, he's been telling you," rumbled the Reefer. "What do you think all those words were that he was pouring out at you when I came in? More than you need to know. More than you should know, I think."
"But nothing that made sense to me," Molly persisted. "How are you trying to communicate with rogue stars?"
The massive head shook with laughter. "Communicate with them, girl? Then maybe he didn't tell you, after all. It's not just communication we're after. We're building one of our own!"
Cliff Hawk broke the shocked silence that followed the Reefer's words: "That's the truth of it, Molly. Or close enough. We can't really communicate with the rogue stars, not directly. We've tried that a thousand times, and it's past our abilities. Solomon Scott tried to reach one. He never came back. But we can—we think we can—build a sort of mathematical model of one. An analogue. A small imitation, you might call it. And through that, here on Earth, we may be able to reach them, find out what we want to know."
"But that's dangerous!" protested Molly. "Aren't rogue stars terribly dangerous?"
The Reefer boomed, "Not a bit, girl! Look at our cave here—you can see there's no danger at all!" And his great laugh filled the cave, drowning out the distant whines and drones.
CM Hawk said uneasily, "In order to duplicate the structure of a rogue star we had to duplicate some of the environmental features. Not really. Not in degree. But we needed great pressure and temperature, and—well, as you can see, we had a little accident."
"Little enough," flashed Molly Zaldivar. "It nearly killed you—and me, for that matter!"
"That's why I want you to go back to Wisdom Creek, Molly. Right away, before . . ."
"Now stop that!" shouted Molly Zaldivar. "I won't go! I was afraid what you were doing was dangerous; that's why I sent for And—well, never mind! But now that I know it, I won't stop until I make you give it up!"
"Impossible. I'll take you back."
"You won't!"
"Great Almalik, girl!" shouted Cliff Hawk, his face showing animation again for the first time. "What's got into you? Don't you understand, I don't want you here! Why won't you go?"
"Because I love you, you idiot!" cried the girl, and broke into tears.
There was silence then, even the Reefer saying nothing, though his eyes winked comically under the bushy yellow brows and his bearded face grinned hugely at the spectacle.
They stood staring at each other, Molly Zaldivar and the man she loved. The silence protracted itself.
And then Molly shivered. "Something's—wrong," she whispered. "I'm scared, Cliff."
Cliff Hawk's stern face lifted. He stood listening, to something that he could not quite hear.
In the opening of the cave mouth the sleeth moved restlessly, the shimmer of its transflection field rippling light across its night-black hide. The Reefer stared at it, then away.
"Girl," he rumbled, "you're right about that. The sleeth's spooked. You know what I think? I think we've got a visitor."
10
Deep under the cave lay a tunnel, driven into the mountain by ancient prospectors a millennium earlier, beaded with galleries thrusting out from the main shaft to seek for gold or silver ores that were never found. For ten centuries they had lain empty, until Cliff Hawk and the Reefer came to fill them with their machines and instruments, to use them to hatch a new life that would serve as their contact with the rogue stars.
In one of these galleries, in a vault that the men had enlarged and bound about with steel and transflection energies, there was a region of great pressure and heat. All the energies of the screaming power tubes were funneled to keep that hot, dense plasma alive. It was an incubator, designed to produce a new life.
And it had succeeded.
Down there in the hot, crushing dark, Something stirred.
Its first knowledge was of pain. It had been born in a place where nothing like it had ever been before, a place that was innately hostile to all things like itself.
It stirred and reached out with an intangible probe of energy. The probe touched the energy-bound steel that kept its plasma environment intact, and recoiled.
I am caught, it told itself. I do not wish to be caught.
And then it fell to pondering the question of what it meant by "I." This occupied it for many thousands of microseconds—a long time in its life, which had just begun, but only a moment by the human standards of the, as yet unknown to it, world outside its pen. Overhead, Cliff Hawk was studying his instruments, ranging into galaxies millions of light-years away. The Reefer was roughly checking the tools and power tubes in the higher cave above, while his sleeth slipped silently and sightlessly around the crest of the hill. And down its slope Molly Zaldivar had just abandoned her old blue electrocar and was stealing toward the entrance.
At that point the new Something in the plasma field concluded its first serious deliberations with a conclusion worthy of a Descartes: I do not know what I am, but I know that I am something capable of finding out what I am.
And it proceeded experimentally to seek a further solution. Gathering its energies, it thrust again at the metal energies that bound it; thrust hard, with neither thought of damage to itself (it had not yet learned the habit of self-preservation) nor interest in the consequences to its environment.
It thrust—and penetrated.
The dense, hot plasma burst free into the cave, shaking the entire hill, destroying its own gallery, melting down the steel bottle that had held it. As it broke free it died; the energies from the power tube that had replenished it were automatically cut off—which saved the hill, and half the countryside around, from destruction. Overhead, the tremor it caused shorted connections, started a fire, caused secondary explosions in a dozen places. It tossed Molly Zaldivar to the floor, rocketed a shard of metal across Cliff Hawk's brow, and threw the Reefer to his knees, where he shouted in apger and pain and called to his sleeth.
The thing that had been born in the plasma did not die. It registered this fact in its billion billion coded electrons without surprise. It had not been sure that it was alive, and had not feared to die. It hung in the corridor, while acrid chemical smoke and bright radiant heat whirled around it, untouched by them, hanging now in its own transflection forces, independent of its environment.
And free.
Now its probes could reach farther. They crept out onto the face of the mountain and lightly touched the unconscious mind of Molly Zaldivar, who moaned in fear and tried to open her eyes. They touched and penetrated the stark, bare thoughts of the sleeth. They studied Cliff Hawk and the Reefer, dismissed the inanimate rock and metal of the mountain and its caves, reached out toward the human minds in Wisdom Creek and found them not worth inspection, scanned the myriad men, women, children, bees, turtles, dolphins, dogs, apes, elephants of Earth and filed them for future examination, reached out to the moon and the planets, shaped themselves and stretched to touch the sun itself.