It is someone who does not belong to the chosen slaves. Someone has no right there, who can be there for no proper purpose.
I am deeply troubled.
I cannot penetrate the mind shields the blasphemers have invented, even to determine their race or their location or the extent of their unholy aims.
Shall I wake HIM to expunge them? Dare I?
I hesitate. As I rouse and survey the widening spheres of contact I see that there are others to follow, and others beyond them. A thousand times a thousand times I have been aroused from sleep to swat an annoying insect or fumigate an erring world. But never before has anyone been so deep in the forbidden places, never shielded so well from my senses.
I must not disturb HUM until HIS time shall come.
Yet now HIS time draws near. On the myriad worlds, my myriad servants are preparing for HIM. The world machine HE dreamed and planned and built is reaching the fulfillment of HIS supernal purpose. HIS moment will be soon.
It will arrive in time, I decide, for HIM to defend HIMSELF. For when HE wakes, all such would-be desecrators of HIS work will be consumed into HIM. No shield can hide them. No weapon can defend them. All beings everywhere will be drunk into HIM.
That is what I fear.
For I myself, like all others, will be engulfed into HIS awful immensity.
Forever.
TWELVE
In spite of its shape the flexible helmet slipped onto Jen Babylon's head with great ease. It did not interfere with his breathing. It was not uncomfortable. It merely blanked out all sensation. He saw no light, heard no sound; it was as though he had poked his head into a pool of utter, silent blackness. He felt Redlaw, or someone, fiddling with the coppery metal at the top of the helmet— And then he was somewhere else! He was in a great, dark chamber, and his first sensation was of nearly lethal fatigue. He was carrying a device he had never seen before, and a huge creature, three great eyes blazing like emerald headlamps, was flapping long, feathered wings in slow time before him. Piercing the swollen body was a sharp-tipped spear. An alien of a type he had seen before—a deltaform, a flying species shaped like the triangle of an ancient supersonic aircraft—shrieked over his head. The deltaform spun back toward him. Babylon felt a sharp stab of fear— And was something else.
All his senses shifted; they were blurred and broken and, though he tried to find his own person, he could detect nothing human. He wore the shape of a deltaform! He was slithering down a dark, twisting passage, like the gut inside some dinosaurian beast. Things were following him, things no more human than himself. He heard the clatter of their chitinous shells against the narrow walls and smelled their rancorous stink, and knew what they were. Watchers! Armed Watchers, a combat brigade of them; and under his command—
The wink of an eye; and he was in a different place. He was less fatigued this time, but still in terrible pain. Something serious had happened to his leg, and when he glanced down he saw that it was bleeding and suppurating through a hastily tied rag. He was operating a drill, cutting anchor holes in a body of rock under the distant glowing clouded sky of Cuckoo. His body seemed queerly out of focus—unfamiliar—and he realized with a shock that it was the body of a woman. He was terribly, numbingly cold, and though his hands wore thick gloves the rest of his body—of that female body that he now inhabited—was suffering damage ...
Gone again. And now he was in a lander, crushed in some catastrophe moments before. Through a broken window he saw a landscape whipped under a howling wind, bathed in soft, rose-colored light—gone again!
He was leaping across a great green meadow studded with trees that glowed with a crimson radiance. Undulating and endless, the meadow stretched from forever to eternity before and after. He came down, in Cuckoo's slow, gentle pull, near one of the trees, flexed his legs to spring again— and became aware of a choking sweetness from the tree that paralyzed him for a moment. He sprang weakly, coughing and strangling—
And was gone again. A Scorpian robot and a Watcher were shouting to him in a language he didn't understand; the Watcher's evil beetle stink made his stomach twist. A cloud of bioluminescent midges obscured his vision by dashing themselves into his eyes—
Another place. He was sailing on a blood-colored waveless sea, smooth as oil. Babylon felt a gnawing pain in his lower limbs, and once again it was not merely the pain itself but the odd inability to locate it in his familiar body that made it terrifying. But he could not look down. He was holding the stock of an immense crossbow weapon, and his gaze was not allowed to deviate from the sights, or from the approaching sailing vessel that was his target. It was less than five hundred meters away, then less than four, swiftly cutting in toward his own ship. Its tall masts were oddly curved, and the smooth black sails seemed to grow from them, with no rope or yard. The hull swelled smoothly with only a narrow space that could be a deck; two greenish spots near the prow looked like luminous eyes—
It was alive!
At that moment his muscles were commanded to fire. The crossbow launched its quarrel, a wedge-shaped bit of metal that glowed and sprang into brilliant purplish flame as it left the weapon and exploded into the side of the black ship. In that moment the iron control over his body relaxed and he could look down. The curious imprecision of the pain explained itself—he was not in a human body! Whatever he was, it had a chitinous shell and a dozen furred, spidery legs; and, most terrible shock of all, the ship he was on was alive as well, and tiny mouths, opened on the deck, were gnawing at him—
Gone once more. Babylon had lost control completely now. He could not say at any moment where he was or out of whose—or what being's—eyes he saw. It became a flickering kaleidoscope, giant trees kilometers tall followed by red-lit thundering caverns, black balloons that trailed living ropes toward him, and tiny creatures like treefrogs underfoot, mewing piteously as he crushed them. For a moment he was on a plain with half a dozen other Purchased human beings, cowering in a hailstorm, pellets as big as his head, under a thick snake of twisting cloud pulsing with scarlet lightning, and then he was in a chamber, a Scorpian holding a metallic mechanism of some sort from which a blob of green light grew and spun toward him. He had just time to realize that he was in a human body again, taller and healthier than his own, when the green blob struck.
In agony he wrenched the helmet away, and crumpled, half fainting, into Zara's arms. "I think that time I died," he gasped. "My God! What things I saw!"
Doc Chimp hopped over with a bulb of something to drink—something that made Babylon sputter and gasp. "Just my own home-made jungle juice, Dr. Babylon," the chimp apologized, "but I thought you'd need it."
Babylon breathed hoarsely, then nodded. "I saw—oh, what did I not see! Things I never dreamed of! Places I never knew existed!"
Zara gently freed herself and nodded. "That's the whole thing, Jen," she said. "When you put that helmet on, you're seeing through the eyes of Purchased People all over Cuckoo—some of them not human. And you're seeing things that are not in the synoptics! Things that there is no record of anywhere!"
"But how can that be?"
"Treachery!" Redlaw boomed, his red beard waggling with indignation. "Somebody—some races—are up to private activities that they keep secret from the rest of us! They've got an unregistered tachyon communicator; they've employed Purchased People without recording them. When I put that helmet on I saw places and things that I had not even suspected—and I was born on Cuckoo, Babylon!" He snatched the dataglobe out of Doc Chimp's stereostage, added it to a pile of hexagons. "Here, Babylon! You've got the only equipment to play these things—study them! Try to find out what they mean! And, above all, don't let our enemies know what you're doing!"