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Chapter 4

Grimes was not a good subject for hypnosis. For him the words of the long-dead poet had always held special meaning: I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. And for so many years he had been a captain, literally as well as figuratively. Even as a junior officer in the Federation's Survey Service he had been in command—only of small ships, but in command nonetheless.

Too, this was more, much more, than mere hypnosis. The telepath would be actually entering his mind, working from the inside. Psychic seduction or psychic rape . . . Whatever label was attached to it would make it no more pleasant from the viewpoint of this particular victim.

Luckily Grimes and Mayhew were friends, very old friends. Luckily Grimes trusted, fully, his Psionic Communications Officer. Even so, he didn't like it. Even so, it had to be done.

The Commodore sat in the master chair in the control room, the one from which one man could be in full and complete charge of every operation, every function of the ship. It was only on rare occasions that a captain did exercise such direct, personal control; in normal circumstances there were officers to do this and to do that, to watch this screen and those tell-tale lights. But, Mayhew explained, it was essential that now Grimes, more than ever before, must feel himself to be no more (and no less) than the brain, with Faraway Quest as his mechanical body.

Grimes sat in the master chair, with controls, set in the armrests, under his finger tips, with other controls in the waist-high console before him. Behind the console, facing him, stood Mayhew. To one side sat Sonya, with Williams and Carnaby. Mayhew had been insistent that no other members of the Quest's crew be present, had been reluctant to admit even the Commodore's wife, his second-in-command, his navigator. "But," Grimes had insisted, "if things go wrong, very wrong, there will be people here capable of taking over at once."

Mayhew held out a small tumbler of clear fluid. He said, "Drink this, John."

"What is it, Ken?" asked Grimes suspiciously. "Something fancy in the hallucinogenic line that the Quack brewed up?"

"No." The telepath grinned. "Just a mild sedative. You're too tense . . ."

"Down the hatch!" toasted Grimes, taking the glass and raising it to his mouth, gulping the contents. He said accusingly, "There should have been an ice cube and a hint of bitters. I like my gin—but not neat and warm . . ."

"It's the effect that matters, not the flavor," remarked Mayhew smugly. "And it's made you drowsy, hasn't it? You've had very little sleep of late, and you're tired. Very tired. Why not admit it? Yes, you are tired . . ." Subtly the telepath's voice was changing. At first it had been pleasantly conversational, now a note of insistent suggestion was becoming more and more evident. Grimes thought, I shouldn't have had that large, neat gin . . . Stubbornly he tried to visualize a mug of very hot, very black coffee, then dismissed the image from his mind. He was in this of his own free will, wasn't he? It was just that he hated to make himself subject to another's control.

"You are very tired, very tired . . . Why not relax? Yes, relax. Visualize your body part by part, member by member . . . Let every muscle, every tendon go slack, slack . . ."

S.O.P., thought Grimes smugly. He'll tell me next to try to raise my arm, and I'll decide that it's just not worth the bother . . . But I wish that I didn't have the sensation of somebody scratching around inside my mind like an old hen . . .

"Relax, relax . . . Visualize your body, part by part . . . Your right foot . . ."

And Grimes realized that he was visualizing his foot, in every detail—the bones, the sinews, the muscles, the slightly hairy skin, the toes and the toenails, even the texture of the encasing sock and the glossy polish of the black shoe.

He thought defiantly, There are better feet to visualize, and allowed his regard to stray to the neatly shod Sonya, to the long, smooth legs gleaming below the hem of her brief uniform skirt. But his own, uninteresting, utilitarian rather than handsome foot persisted in his mind's eye.

"You cannot feel your foot any longer, John. You cannot move your foot. Perhaps it is not your foot . . . Whose foot could it be? What foot could it be?"

And . . . And it was not a human foot any longer. It was a scaly claw, scrabbling on a filthy wooden deck . . .

Grimes was no longer in the control room of Faraway Quest; he was in the master compass room of a primitive steamship on Tharn, one of the worlds of Rim Runners' Eastern Circuit. He was looking (as he had looked, long ago) with pity and disgust at the living compass, at the giant homing bird, its wings brutally clipped, imprisoned in its tight harness from which the spindle extended upwards, through deck after deck, to the bridge, to the binnacle in the bowl of which quivered the needle, always indicating the Great Circle course to the port of destination, to the coastal town in which was the nest where the bird had been hatched and reared. The illusion was fantastically detailed; the thin, high keening of the Mannschenn Drive faded to inaudibility, the irregular beat of the inertial drive became the rhythmic thudding of an archaic reciprocating steam engine . . .

And then . . .

And then Grimes was no longer looking at the bird. He was the bird. He was dimly aware of the feel of the deck underfoot—unyielding timber instead of sand or grassy soil—and more strongly aware of the constriction of the harness about the upper part of his body. Suddenly there was a greater awareness. It was as though every atom of calcium in his bones had been replaced by those of iron. It was as though, somewhere ahead, there was a huge, fantastically powerful magnet—but not exactly ahead, that was the worst of it. He cried out with the pain of it as supernal forces twisted his body. (He learned later that his cry was the squawk of a bird.)

He thought defiantly, But I am a man. I am an Earthman.

A scrap of half-forgotten verse drifted into his brain, Earthmen, shape your orbits home . . . Home . . . And again the scrap of verse, The green hills of Earth . . . The green hills and, vivid against the dark verdure, a flight of white pigeons . . . Wings beating, beating . . . And the noise in his ears was no longer the steady stamping of a triple-expansion engine, but the drumming of wings. Wings—and a skein of geese dark and distant against the cloudless blue sky. Wings—and the migrating flock maintaining its course over the black, foam-streaked sea, through the blizzard . . .

The blizzard and the whirling flakes, glowing white, incandescent against the darkness, the snow-flakes that were stars, multitudinous, brightly scintillant in the ultimate night . . .

The blizzard, the whirling blizzard of stars, and through it, beyond it . . .

Home.

Again there was the wrenching of his bones, his nervous system, his entire body. That supernaturally powerful magnetic field was not ahead, was not in the direct line of flight. Something, thought Grimes, would have to be done about it. He was, he knew, a bird, a huge bird, a metal bird with machinery in lieu of wings. His hands went out to the console before him. Williams and Carnaby were out of their chairs, tense, ready to take over. There were so many things that could go wrong, that could be done with a dreadful and utterly final wrongness. Nobody knew, for example, just what would happen if an alteration of trajectory were carried out while the dimension-twisting Mannschenn Drive was in operation . . . (It had been tried from time to time with small, unmanned, remote- or robot-controlled craft, and such vessels had vanished, never to return.)

But Grimes, temporarily a homing bird, was permanently a spaceman.

Under his hand the inertial drive fell silent, the ever-precessing rotors of the Mannschenn Drive sighed to a stop. There was the weightlessness of Free Fall, succeeded by the uncomfortable, twisting pull of centrifugal forces as the directional gyroscopes hummed and then whined, dragging the Quest about her short axis on to the new heading.

The persistent tug on Grimes' bones lessened but did not die—but now that it came from the right direction the sensation was more pleasant than otherwise.

He restarted the inertial drive and then the interstellar drive.

He heard Williams' voice coming from a very long way away, "Cor, stiffen the bleedin' crows! I do believe that the old bastard's done it!"

Grimes smiled. He knew that the word "bastard," in Williams' vocabulary, was a term of endearment.

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Framed