III
Five minutes later Langford was replacing the bandages on Joan’s eyes. He felt like a man who was playing a game with a deadly, unseen antagonist in a room full of crouching shadows. No—not a room. As he bent above his wife, his hand on her tumbled hair, the space about him seemed to fall away into darkness. And now he was gazing straight down the interplanetary deeps at a green world swimming in a nebulous haze. The haze dissolved, drifted away, and he saw the green hills of his native land.
He saw the earth, and crouching shadows covered the face of the land.
The crouching shadows of enormous insects. He could not escape from them because they were everywhere; when he broke into a run the mantis shapes followed him. They towered above him, sinister, horrible. He felt like a man caught in an invisible trap, the sky hemming him in, the ground beneath his feet a dissolving quagmire.
He shook the illusion off, for he did not want Joan to see the shadows as he saw them. What was it Crendon had said? She must be made to feel that you need her. Well, he did; he knew now that more than his own honor was at stake. If the alien ship could not be located his fears would not remain subjective. The fate of humanity hung in the balance.
His imagination had been stimulated abnormally by the events of the past few days; now it was leaping ahead of developments. For all he knew to the contrary the alien ship had foundered in the void or crashed on one of the inner planets in a red swirl of destruction.
Interstellar exploration was not without its risks and those risks would mount steadily to an alien intelligence as unfamiliar landmarks loomed up out of the void.
“You do not need the bandages,” Langford said, a deep solicitude in his voice. “If you simply shut your eyes you would see the ship clearly. My thoughts would guide you to it.”
“My vision is sharper when my eyes are bandaged,” Joan replied. “You must trust me, darling; I know. When my eyes are sealed there is no emotional block and my inner vision has free play. I am prevented from using my eyes by an actual physical impediment. So I strain all of my faculties to see as far as I can in the dark. Call it a psychological quirk if you wish; I only know that it helps.”
“If it helps that’s all that matters,” Langford assured her. “Forget I put my oar in.”
“Don’t think about the ship for a minute,” Joan said. “Make your mind a blank. Then visualize yourself standing before the viewport staring out, just as you stood when you first saw the alien ship. Visualize the ship coming toward you through the void. If you can visualize it clearly I’ll be able to locate it, no matter where it is now.”
Joan paused, as though she didn’t quite know how to make the complexity of the problem clear to her husband. “I can’t explain the power,” she said; “I know so little about ‘time,’ far less than the physicists think they know. Mutants, they tell us, can visualize ‘time’ as a stationary dimension, freezing all event objects in ‘the past’ and in the ‘probable future.’ They can travel along ‘time’ in either direction at will.”
“But you do not think of it as an actual journey?” Langford asked; “you merely shut your eyes and see?”
Joan shook her head. “It isn’t quite as simple as that. Clairvoyance is never simple; it’s accompanied by an intense inward illumination. It’s a little like staring at something through a long vista of converging prisms. Objects get in the way and there’s doubt, uncertainty. Sometimes it’s sheer torment.
“Sometimes I can’t see at all. And even when I can see there’s a curious, almost terrifying sense of wrongness about it.”
“You mean you feel guilty?”
Joan smiled slightly. “Did Alice feel guilty when she went through the looking glass? Perhaps she did! But I didn’t mean that kind of wrongness, not a moral wrongness. It’s as though the strange tensions will get you if you don’t watch out. Rush in upon you and project you forcibly into another place. As though you were a jet of steam imprisoned in a bottle that’s much too tight and forced in the wrong direction by a power you can’t begin to understand.
“You keep fearing you’ll get caught in the neck of the bottle and wake up screaming.”
“Good Lord!” Langford muttered.
“I’ve never got caught,” Joan said. “Now make your mind a blank, darling. We’re going to find that ship!”
A moment later Langford stood holding his wife’s hand, a sharp apprehension in his stare. Joan seemed slightly agitated. She sat gripping the arms of her chair, her bandaged eyes turned from the light.
Suddenly her lips moved. “Ralph, I can see the ship! It’s coming straight toward the viewport. You didn’t tell me it was so beautiful, so—so huge!”
“I was waiting for you to tell me!” Langford said, quickly.
“Well, I’m telling you, darling! I’m glad you didn’t completely visualize it. Now I’m sure I’m not just reading your mind. It must be three hundred feet long; it’s hard to tell where the illumination comes from.”
Joan straightened suddenly. “It’s no longer just a ship,” she said. “I’m still outside, but I’ve moved closer to it. And I can sense a rustling deep inside the hull, a vague stir of activity that’s not entirely physical.”
While Langford held his breath Joan pressed her palms to her temples. “The rustling is becoming clear. There are swift, abrupt movements, accompanied by thoughts. But I’m not sure whether the thoughts come from one mind or many minds. The thoughts are swift, piercing. Darting thoughts. That’s the only way I can describe them.”
Her voice rose slightly. “I can sense a living presence deep inside the ship. More than one, I think. There’s a kind of swarming.”
“A swarming?”
“I’m not sure about that,” Joan said, quickly. “I don’t think they’re moving about much. The thoughts seem to come from one direction. I can just make out a shape now; it’s tall, and very slender.”
“Winged?” Langford whispered.
“No, no, don’t prompt me!” Joan was excited. “The important thing is that I can see it. I may never see it clearly. Gauzy—yes, it is winged. It has gauzy, shining wings, folded on its chest. Two clawlike appendages, raised in a praying attitude. Perhaps I saw that in your mind; you mustn’t interrupt again.”
“I won’t!” Langford promised.
“The creature is horribly agitated!” Joan said. “It looks upon your ship as a menace. Its brain is humming with fear; it is preparing to contact you, warn you. It’s getting ready to warn you in a strange way. It has prepared something for just such an emergency. Something small, glistening. I can’t make it out, but it’s putting the object into a luminous shell!”
“That’s right!” Langford said, forgetting his promise. “They shot the shell into the void; we picked it up with a magnetic trawl.”
There was a brief silence as Joan thought that out. Then her lips twisted in a strained smile. “If you say another word—”
“Sorry!”
“It’s bad; it hinders.” She raised her arms in a gesture of grim urgency. “Now the ship is moving swiftly away from your ship. I can dimly sense vast distances rushing past. And there’s a feeling of loneliness, of utter desolation. No despair, exactly; it’s as though I were sensing the utter desolation of deep space through a mind filled with a bitter nostalgia!
“If the feeling wasn’t so intense, so strange and bewildering, I’d say it was a ‘Carry me back to old Virginia’ feeling! Does that make sense to you? It’s like—someone thrumming a guitar a billion miles from home, whistling to keep up his courage, remembering something very precious and beautiful lost forever. I can’t explain it in any other way.”
She was silent for a moment. Then she said: “Now a planet is taking shape in the darkness. It’s pale green and crossed by a long, wavering streamer of light. I can make out continents and seas.”
Joan stiffened. “Ralph! There’s only one planet in the Solar System that catches the sunlight through great swarms of meteors in the plane of its ecliptic. The lights of the Zodiac! It must be the Earth!”
Langford dared not speak for fear of breaking the spell. Joan was trembling now, as though thoughts from the past were impinging with a tormenting intensity on her inner vision.
“The ship’s out of control!” came suddenly. “It’s plunging down through the lower atmosphere toward a vast expanse of jungle. A tropical rain forest. A mist is rising over the trees and a burst of flame is coming from the ship. It’s zigzagging as it descends.”
Emotion seemed to quiver through her. For a moment she remained silent, her lips slightly parted.
Then more words came in a rush. “The ship lies on an island in a forking river. Above it the foliage is charred, blackened. There are three rivers and just below the island the water is white with foam. There’s a tremendous cataract about five miles below the island. It’s the largest cataract I’ve ever seen.”
There was an eagerness on Langford’s face, but he remained silent.
“There’s a man swimming in the river above the cataract,” Joan went on. “A brown-skinned man with straggly hair, his shoulders gleaming in the sunlight. I’m going to try to read his mind.”
Langford did not move. For a moment there was no sound in the room save Joan’s harsh breathing. Then, suddenly, she straightened and ripped the bandage from her eyes.
“Brazil!” she exclaimed, exultantly. “Darling, I’ve located the ship for you. That island is in the interior of Brazil, in the deep jungle, close to the headwaters of the Amazon!”
Langford stood very still, scarcely daring to breathe. In his mind’s gaze he saw a slender space cruiser lying unguarded in a suburban hanger close to the dark waters of the great Northwestern Canal. Commander Gurney’s own private cruiser, the White Hawk!
How much of his mental audacity was inspired by sheer desperation Langford could not guess. But he suddenly saw himself climbing out of a thrumming jet plane in deep shadows and running straight toward the cruiser with Joan at his side.
He saw the cruiser ascending, saw himself at the controls, with the red disk of Mars dwindling beyond the viewport. He saw the myriad stars of space and the rapidly expanding disk of the Earth pierced by wavering banners of light.
And then it dawned on him that in some strange way Joan had seen the vision first and was sharing it with him. He knew then that he could not fail.