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Chapter 10

His vision was blurring again. Harybdartt, breathing with difficulty, centered himself and focused and blinked his inner eyelids until the alien was clear again in his sights.

It hovered motionless before him, only the hazy glow of the force-field linking the two.

Linking their minds.

It was a strange sensation. It was nothing resembling full telepathic communication, but a certain level of understanding had been achieved. He was being studied, but he had also gathered some impressions of his own. Images flickered in his mind—mostly puzzling images, because the languages of thought were so different—but here and there a visual depiction snapped clear: objects moving across the layers of a grid, moving between points that clearly represented planetary or stellar coordinates. The grid had blinked insistently.

Harybdartt was not trained for linguistic interpretation, but he could tell when he was being asked the location of his homeworld. He'd refused to respond—and been unable to refuse. He'd struggled, involuntarily, to retrieve that memory—and struggled to keep it to himself.

There was no such memory.

The alien, the implacable foe, the mechanized killer, had ceased trying once the futility was made clear. Oddly, it seemed intent upon understanding, rather than upon destroying. This enemy seemed to want to translate and interpret the El's visual and linguistic structure. Even more oddly, Harybdartt's own determination to die rather than allow the thing in his mind was diminishing.

So far as he knew, there had never been any real communication between the Ell and the Outsiders, this enemy which had struck against his people with so little warning and such ferocity. Though it was outside his expertise, he wondered if any good could come from such communication. It was conceivable . . . but here, captive to the enemy in this deserted star system? It seemed unlikely.

There was another problem, and that was that he was dying.

It came as no surprise. Even with strict conservation, his life-support could not last much longer. All systems were low, but the critical level was in the gas replenisher, which supplied him with the needed mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon and sulfur compounds. The warning reader had been flickering dimly for some time now.

[I cannot live much longer,] he stated in his thoughts, wondering if the alien could understand. He blinked slowly in the glow of the force-field, trying to focus on the stars. He could no longer see them through the glow.

There was a dull pain at the base of his neck. Perhaps the end was even closer than he'd thought.

A sparkle of light flashed through the force-field. Something tickled the inside of his brain, and he breathed deeply to keep his thoughts clear, and succeeded only in flushing his membranes with stale air. He blinked again. [I am dying,] he thought deliberately. [In a short time, everything I have learned will be gone . . .]

. . . Unless, of course, the alien possessed the means to extract memories and thoughts from a dead El's brain.

If the alien robot read that last thought, it gave no indication. It sparkled a picture into Harybdartt's mind: Two small figures beside a larger mass—an asteroid?—and tiny waves of light passing back and forth between them. Another picture grew out of the first: An outline of the two figures, enlarged blurrilythen gradually becoming clearer and more sharply detailed as the waves of light continued.

Was this the alien's expression of hope that they could continue to communicate, and learn from one another? [I regret,] he answered, forming the words very carefully in his thoughts, [that it will not be possible for this to continue.] He wondered if it understood. Was there a way to put that into a picture?

He felt something try to form itself in his mind—words struggling to be born. He encouraged it with a whisper: [Say it.] There was a stuttering sensation in his mind, and then something emerged that felt, that formed itself, as the words: [Not . . . possible . . . interrogative.]

[No,] he said, thinking that in this glowing field, this living hallucination among the stars, was it possible that this alien machine had just spoken to him using Ell words, Ell thoughts?

He felt an urgent questioning in the center of his mind. It was the alien, seeking an answer, an elaboration. He cleared his thoughts and tried to create an image of his own: The two figures floating in space, radiating waves of light toward each other. The waves from one began to slow and to dim, and finally ceased altogether. The figure became silent, unmoving.

[Do you understand?]

There was from the robot no reply.

Harybdartt regarded it silently and wished that the force-field would disappear so that he might gaze unhindered at his captor. His life-signs reader was flickering more rapidly now; his air was becoming suffocatingly stale. [I will die soon,] he thought, and reminded himself that he had been preparing for death for a long time.

New words formed themselves in his mind: [What . . . passage . . . interrogative.]

What passage? [Death,] he answered carefully, forming again the image of an unmoving figure.

[What . . . time . . . interrogative.]

When? He did not know himself. He had never experienced suffocation before.

He imagined a spiral of light growing larger, smaller—expanding and contracting spasmodically, as though it could not make up its mind. He imagined deep uncertainty.

The alien was silent. Several moments blinked by.

The force-field shifted and blazed into sudden brilliance. In his mind, the touching fingers came to life and danced through him, touching lightly but touching everywhere. Dizzy, he was unable to resist. He felt the field scanning his body. He wanted to say, It ends like this, then, with you taking all of the knowledge home with you. I have lost, after all, and betrayed my duty.

He wanted to say that, but the light died suddenly and the field released his body and the touch in his mind vanished. He struggled to focus, but the dizziness was still too great. [Wait!] he murmured. He closed his eyes and reached inward for his center, striving to halt the spinning, the dizziness. He opened his eyes again, and slowly they came back into focus.

There was nothing but stars before him, and an asteroid over his head, and a single distant sun. The alien was gone.

He absorbed that fact, and he thought, drawing his honor back around him like a mantle, with a breath of puzzlement: It is done, then. It is time to die alone, and in peace.

And yet, somewhere in the back of his thoughts, the word Wait . . . ! rolled like the beat of a distant drum.

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Framed