“I don’t want to be put to sleep for thousands of years,” Val protests. Frodo’s thought echoes her.
“Why did it bring us here if it didn’t want to rescue us?” Winona’s mind asks. The sense of normal conversation is so absurdly strong in this incredible situation; for an instant Dann is back in the Deerfield messhall.
“Maybe it wants to use us as fuel,” Frodo suggests. “Maybe it runs on life.”
“No…” Winona “says” hesitantly. “No, I don’t get that feeling.”
“ Whatever, we have to get through to it before it turns us all off,” Waxman’s thought comes decisively. “Who wants to try contacting Ted?”
“It’s dangerous,” Val comments. “Ted’s a strong dreamer.”
There is a pause filled with almost-speech, and suddenly Chris sends right through Dann, so loudly it makes him resonate: “I’ll try if Doc’ll hold onto me.”
“Right, good,” Waxman replies. “Over here, Chris. Be careful.”
Dann can only marvel at their sense of organization in this weird modality. He feels more tugging, and their misty constellation seems to revolve slowly, until the half-seen life that must be Chris hanging to him converges toward a vague small pallor. Can that be poor Ted’s mind, curled around an isolated node? Chris seems to change balance, accompanied by a tightening mental hand-clasp; surprisingly, Chris’ “hand” feels bigger now, a full man’s hand.
“Hang tight, Doc.”
Dann strengthens the imaginary grip, beginning roughly to understand what is involved here. Chris is proposing to enter a hallucinated mind, perhaps as dangerous as the panic-vortex he himself had experienced. Belatedly, he remembers to cling hard onto Waxman’s grip too.
“Okay.”
There is a sense of he knows not what happening at Chris’ end, and all at once Dann finds himself invaded by a brilliant vision of sunlit tropical waters, streaming foam. The vision comes in fragmentary bursts; through it he manages to maintain his mental holds. But it is hard. Now he is feeling his own body rush through the water, flinging spray from his flanks as he leaps. Good God, is he a porpoise? Hang on. Even though with flippers splashing, he is hanging on through sun and green water and a confused sense of shouting—until suddenly the vision snaps out, and he is back in dark space, feeling Chris’ mind-touch tremble against his own.
“No good.” Chris transmits weakly, like a man gasping. “I couldn’t break him out. He made me into a goddamn fish. The computer screen’s still there, I could see the words NEGATIVE and HELP CANCEL. He won’t look anymore, he’s in heaven.”
A dismayed silence, humming with stray half-thoughts. Then Giadoc’s “voice” repeats clearly, “He is our only link.”
“If we all try to break him out together I think he’d go crazy,” Waxman sends. Other minds agree. “That wouldn’t help.”
They fall silent again, conscious of the ominous quietude creeping closer and closer, conscious of the cryptic fortress of energies so near at hand yet so impregnable. Abruptly Winona’s thought explodes in their minds:
“Look! Look, inside that brain or whatever! Don’t you see?”
What, where? Dann tries to “look” at the thing, loses it, finally gets a focus long enough to see that its interior is now in slow, intricate motion, as if strands of pale, cold light mingled in complex dance. One spot seems brighter than the rest.
“That’s Margaret in there?” Winona shakes them all. “It’s Margaret! I’d recognize her anywhere.”
Margaret?
Margaret, his lost one, here? All at once Dann’s human life comes pouring back through him as if an inner dam had broken. The bits and pieces he has been idling with suddenly fall together, making overwhelming order.
The great black shape that swallowed her, the Destroyer, that’s where they are. She fled into this. Is it possible she’s still alive, in whatever mode of life this is, is she trapped in there?
He focusses with all his might in the crazy indirect way he can “see” here. That bright spot. Can it be the very flame, the life-spark he had followed so desperately? Yes! Yes—it is she! He is sure.
Without thought he gathers his strength as a man might take a deep breath, drawingunknowingly on all the lives around him, and hurls a mental cry at the Destroyer’s walclass="underline"
“MARGARET! MY DARLING, I’LL HELP YOU!”
He falls back, hit by a sense of stunned disengagement.
“Don’t do that again,” comes Waxman’s distant “voice.”
But someone else is exlaiming, “Look! Look!”
Dann’s attention is all on the cloudy pale fires within. The star that he knows is Margaret seems to be drawing nearer to him.
“He reached it.” Val’s “hand” touches him. “Let him try again.”
“All right.” Waxman’s phantom hand comes back too. “But take it easy this time, Doc.”
Trying to modulate himself, Dann grasps at their tenuous touch.
“Margaret! It’s Dann here, Doctor Dann. Can you speak to me?”
More silent swirlings, the starlike point brightens. But no sense of thought or word comes. Instead, as it had done for Ted Yost, an image seems to rise and glimmer in his mind. He recognizes it incredulously—Margaret’s computer screen. Oh God, is this her only mode of communication here? He tries to bring it in focus, tries also to maintain contact with the others. Do they see it too?
Pale blue letters come to life on the ghostly screen:
/ / DOCTOR*DANN*IS*THAT*YOU/ /
“Yes! Yes!” he projects eagerly.
But the letters have changed, grown huge and ominous. They march across the screen, repeating meaninglessly:
—I MUST FOLLOW—I MUST SEARCH—I MUST FOLLOW—I MUST SEARCH—as though a vast mechanical voice is intervening.
“Margaret!”
At his cry the letters break down to normal size.
//DOCTOR*DANN*YOU*WON’T*HURT*ME*WILL*YOU//
“No, never my dear! Never! Tell me what to do!”
But the silently booming symbols are back, filling the screen. —I MUST FOLLOW—I MUST SEARCH—I MUST FOLLOW—
“Margaret! Margaret, tell me how to help you!”
—I MUST FOLLOW—I MUST SEARCH—I MUST—
Desperate, Dann pulls on the strengths around him.
“MARGARET!”
Again the normal screen comes back.
//CANT * TURN * OFF * NEED * MORE * STRENGTH// I * WILL * OPEN * WAY * IN * JUST * YOU// And then her words are swept away by the maniacal huge intruders:—I MUST FOLLOW—I MUST SEARCH—
He senses she has spent all her strength. The next move is up to him.
“I’m going to try to get to her. She said she can open it. Waxman, can you hang onto me somehow?”
“Right.”