He paused, his lungs seared with the violence of his breathing, and forced himself to shout, "Molly! Are you here?"
The robot voice sang startlingly from just behind him, "She is fifty meters to your right, Monitor Quamodian, and just above us. But do not approach."
Andy Quam was already on his way, scrambling around the lip of the little ledge before the cave mouth.
"No, wait! There are unpredictable entities about, Monitor Quamodian. A beast from space. And—" the singing whine of the robot faltered, "the rogue star. Allow me to study them!"
Andy Quam snorted, but made no other answer. He slid on loose gravel, caught himself and ran on. It was a forty-foot drop, he had just escaped death, but he had not even noticed it in his haste to find Molly Zaldivar. But where was she?
And then he stopped, sliding and waving his arms to keep from falling.
Something like a giant black squid was leaping toward him, up over the rubble and the smoke, shimmering in a pale transflection field. In the dim starlight he caught a glimpse of great blind eyes staring at him, claws that could rip the guts out of a pyropod. "Monitor Quamodian!" sang the robot peremptorily from behind. "That creature is a sleeth. Do not, I caution you, approach it!"
There was suddenly a sour, coppery taste of fear in Quamodian's mouth. A sleeth—now he recalled the stories about those space beasts, evolved for killing, powerful beyond human competition. If it took a mind to attack him there would be no hope.
But it seemed to have no such intention. It hung there studying him, almost as though it had intelligence, even empathy, even understanding of his haste. Then, as though it were giving permission, it lifted up and away on its transflection fields and hung waiting, a hundred meters up, no longer between him and the little hummock where he could see shadowy forms.
He spared the sleeth no more thought, but scrambled, slid and trotted the remaining distance and dropped to his knees beside the girl who had summoned him across half the known universe. "Molly!" he cried. "What's happened? What have they done to you?"
He crooked an arm under her head, raised her tenderly.
And her eyes opened.
She looked at him wonderingly, like a child awakened from sleep. Her face was bloody, scratched, smudged with soot and filth. Her hair was flying loose as chaff on a breeze, and her clothes were shredded into rags. But suddenly and gloriously she smiled at him. "Why, it's little Andy Quam," she whispered. "I should have known you'd come."
The smile lingered, briefly only. Then, without warning, her face twisted, the smile fled, she turned her head away. And Molly Zaldivar wept as though her heart would break.
"Robot Inspector!" shouted Andy Quam. "Where is that fool machine?"
From the side of a boulder, ten feet away, a small voice said querulously, "He's gone, preacher. Just zipped away. Almalik knows where. Didn't say a word."
"What are you doing here, Rufe?" Andy Quam demanded. "You should stay in the flyer. Well, as long as you're here, give me a hand. Miss Zaldivar's been hurt. We've got to get her to help . . ."
A figure disengaged itself from the gloom and stepped closer. "No hurry about that, friend," it rumbled. "She lived through this much, she'll live awhile yet."
Quamodian jumped to his feet, ready for anything. He peered into the darkness, caught a glimpse of dulled yellow mustache, dingy yellow beard, a face that looked as though planets had rolled over it in their orbits. "Who the devil are you?" he barked.
"Talk big for a little fellow, don't you?" rasped the voice. "No harm. No hard feelings." He stepped closer and Quamodian got the measure of the size of him, a giant of a man, but oddly subdued. "No one around here wants trouble," he added in a mild bass growl. "Not any more. But the girl's all right, I got her out of the tunnel before she got hurt."
Quam said suspiciously, "I heard something about a Reefer up here with Cliff Hawlc, doing Almalik knows what foul work. Are you him?"
"I am."
"Then that's your sleeth watching us up there."
The Reefer's mustache and beard parted company. In the gloom it looked almost as though he were preparing to bite Andy Quam, but it was only a soundless, humorless laugh. "Not mine any more," he declared. "His own by now, I expect. Or—something's. But he won't take orders from me, not since the sun hit us." He turned aside from Andy Quam, bent for a moment over the girl. "She's all right," he said, straightening, but his voice didn't sound very sure. "You might be right about getting her out of here, though. Me too, if you don't mind."
"Why is Molly Zaldivar crying like that?" Quamodian demanded. "If you've hurt her. . ."
The great head shook from side to side. "Nothing I did," he said. "I expect it's Cliff Hawk she's crying about."
Quamodian pulled himself together; he had completely forgotten that Hawk was here! It was his fault, no doubt, that Molly Zaldivar had been hurt, endangered, terrified; yet there was still enough friendship left between Quamodian and Cliff Hawk for Andy Quam's voice to show real concern as he asked, "What about Hawk? Is he hurt?"
"Not any more."
"What? You mean—dead?"
The great voice tolled leadenly. "Not that either. Worse, I'd say. A lot worse. And if you want my opinion, we ought to get away from here before something worse happens to us, too."
The Something that had been a random mass of stripped electrons, then an infant rogue star, then a seeking, learning, experimenting entity —and was now something else—"watched" the Reefer and Andy Quam gently lift the weeping girl, carry her down the slope to the flyer, hastily enter, slam the door and race away.
With one part of itself, the rogue caused the sleeth to soar after them on its transflection fields, keeping the flyer effortlessly in view. It was not necessary to do that, of course. The rogue could easily have kept the flyer under observation with its probes, anywhere on the face of this planet and indeed almost anywhere in this solar system. (It had not yet had occasion to try to perceive anything farther away than the planets.)
But it was no longer the simple creature it had been.
When it had perceived that one of the organized radiant masses was in danger of extinction it had occurred to its still simple mind that it might be worth acquiring, and so it had acquired it. It turned out to be easy—a "stretch," a "grasp," a "hold." If it had been matter doing these things, one might have said that it was like the flow of an amoeba, englobing and digesting a tasty bit of food. Matter was not involved, and the forces that the rogue deployed did not lend themselves to description in three-space geometry.
But the effect was the same.
What had once been the persona of Cliff Hawk no longer inhabited its biological body. That body, in fact, was not merely dead but by now an unrecognizable lump of contorted charcoal, mixed with the other charred and destroyed Utter in the burned-out tunnel that had once been Hawk's workshop.
But something of him remained. It no longer had identity of its own, as an individual. But it was at least a perceptible fraction of that seething, restless entity that surged through the interstices of the mountain, that followed Andy Quam's flyer in the person of the sleeth, that had brought the wrath of the sun striking down on the summit of the hill, that was a newborn rogue star loosed in the universe.
It no longer "thought" in simple urges and observations.
Through the trained intelligence of its human component it now could observe, analyze, record—and act.
It sensed the wonder of that far-off watcher.
Technically it was still Starday; at the boy's suggestion Andy Quam ordered the flyer to take them to the Starchurch. "There'll be a crowd for late-night services," he said, "and likely enough nobody's going to be where you expect them, otherwise. I mean, even the hospital might not have a crew on duty."