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CHAPTER NINE

Svyatog'Korth studied the ruined remote that Roark had appropriated from Ada Rivera. Then he set it down on his desk, and leaned back in his chair and gazed over steepled fingers in a way that was eerily human.

"Let me make sure I understand," the translator said in the English that Roark no longer had to keep separate from the Lokaron actually emerging from the factor's mouth—he automatically edited the latter out as background noise. "This Havelock, a high officer of American intelligence and your superior, is also the leader of the Eaglemen—who, in addition to opposing us, seek the overthrow of the very American regime he serves. How can you be certain of this?"

"I can't. But it's the only explanation that makes sense of what I overheard Rivera tell Stoner, her Eagleman subordinate. And it makes sense of a lot of other things I've been wondering about. For example, how did the Eaglemen penetrate the Company's security so completely as to get three of their people placed among the six agents sent here, including the controller? Simple: Havelock was in charge of personnel selection—he could pack the operation with Eaglemen. Same goes for the attack force that was waiting out there. I had thought the attack was an Eagleman stunt that Rivera was manipulating us into supporting. But it really was a Company operation—organized by Havelock, who was able to put Eaglemen in crucial positions."

"It also explains how the Company got its in-depth information about the Enclave," Katy put in. "Back when I was reporting to the Eaglemen, I was unwittingly reporting to Havelock. I wasn't high up enough in the organization to know the identity of our real leader; only the command cell knew that."

"So," Svyatog mused, "for an unknown length of time the Eaglemen have been making a tool of the American intelligence apparatus."

"Unless it's the other way around," Roark cautioned. "We don't know where Havelock's real loyalties lie."

"Ha!" Katy's voice was rich with scorn. " `Real loyalties'? Havelock? You've got to be kidding! Nothing is real where you're dealing with that lying cocksucker." (Roark couldn't help wondering how Svyatog's translator rendered that. Something appropriate, no doubt.) "The only thing you can be certain of is that he's got his own private agenda, which has nothing to do with the Company, the Eaglemen, or America. They're just means to whatever end he's pursuing, and he wouldn't hesitate a second to sell out any or all of them!"

"Katy's right," Roark said quietly. "The man's a compulsive intriguer. And we have no way of knowing what his `private agenda' is."

Svyatog seemed to think out loud. "We could bring in Rivera and Stoner for questioning on the subject. . . . " The Lokar gave his shoulders the odd backwards-and-forwards shake Roark had come to recognize as reflecting a negative decision. "No. It would defeat our efforts to keep the whole business quiet and thus avoid creating an awkward situation within the Enclave for the Rogovon to exploit."

"It wouldn't do any good anyway. They know him in his Eagleman persona, which is probably no less phony than his Company one."

Svyatog again looked thoughtful. "Huruva has direct diplomatic contact with the American government. Through him, I could enable the two of you to bypass Havelock and inform his superiors of his involvement with the Eaglemen."

"They wouldn't believe us. Remember, in their eyes we're traitors. They'd think we were just spreading disinformation on your behalf." Roark looked glum. "Same goes for the idea I had—for about two seconds—of contacting Chen and Pirelli, the two non-Eaglemen left among the agents here, and telling them they're being played for suckers."

"And," Katy added, "it would do even less good to try to make contact with the Eaglemen. We can't tell them anything they don't already know about his double-dealing. In fact, Rivera and the rest of the command cell must spend a lot of time congratulating themselves on having their fearless leader highly placed in the Company—they don't know him like we do. And anyway, they'd be even less likely than the Company to listen to us . . . especially to me."

"They're not exactly a fan club of mine either," Roark said grimly. "Not now. Speaking of which, I fully expect them to try for me—-and for Katy, since Havelock's probably deduced that she's still alive in here. And when I say `them' I include Chen and Pirelli. They'll obey Rivera's orders. Chen, at least, won't like it . . . but he's a Marine."

"Have no fears on that score. I told you I would guarantee your safety, and I fully intend to honor that promise. You've certainly earned our gratitude. Not," he added with a complacency Roark found less than entirely comforting, "that there should be any real danger, now that you're both living in the middle levels of this tower. Especially considering that we know exactly which humans to watch for suspicious moves."

"I suppose not," Katy conceded. But she sounded like Roark felt.

They kept their own counsel all the way back to Katy's apartment. (Svyatog kept promising them something bigger, but Roark was in no particular hurry—the place was more spacious than the room he'd shared with Chen, and the company was a lot more inspiring.) Once there, Roark dropped onto the couch. Katy lowered herself into a chair with its back to the door. They looked at each other for a moment in silent seriousness.

"I don't like it," Katy finally stated.

"Neither do I," Roark agreed. "Svyatog's getting cocky again. Granted, it's hard to see how Rivera and the others could get at us here. But—"

"No, I wasn't even thinking of that. I was thinking of Havelock. Ben, what can he be up to?"

"How the hell should I know? Sorry, I know I'm irritable. But who can follow the ins and outs of a mind that devious?"

"I sometimes wonder. . . . Does he have a goal at all, or is he just driven by a compulsion to duplicity?"

"To be exact, I think he unconsciously picks the goals that let him follow that compulsion." Roark grinned crookedly. "On our flight here, Jerry Chen and I were talking about the way space aliens finally landed after all, though not the way people in the last century expected. Now, we seem to find ourselves in the middle of another old wet-dream: the shadowy, high-level conspiracy."

Katy sought for recollection, then grinned in turn. "Oh, yeah. I remember. After the Watergate business, it was fashionable to believe that some vast, sinister secret government was running everything from behind the scenes."

"Right . . . although it really started before that, with the various assassinations in the decade before Watergate. No conspiracy theory was too far-fetched for people back then to swallow." Roark's grin turned nasty. "There was only one theory they weren't willing to believe, because it was the most nightmarish of all: that there wasn't any omnipotent conspiracy, and that the U.S. government was exactly as it appeared to be. In other words, that they really were ruled by the clueless nebbishes they saw on the TV news every night . . . and that they had nobody to blame but themselves."

"I think," Katy said, turning serious, "that you've just put your finger on the reason those old conspiracy theories were so popular."

Roark laughed harshly. "Yep. They told the Americans of that era precisely what they wanted to hear: `It isn't your fault! You're just victims! It's the Illuminati, or the multinational corporations, or the military-industrial complex, or whoever. They're the reason the government's the way it is—not the fact that you're a flock of silly sheep who vote for whoever the opinion makers tell you to vote for.'" His bitter humor abruptly fled—or at least the humor did, leaving only the bitterness. "No wonder the EFP took over a generation later. It pandered to the fashionable paranoia of the age . . . which meant, underneath all the bullshit, that it was promising to shield people from what they really feared: having to take responsibility for their own choices."

Katy's serious look shaded over into grimness. "I was more right than I knew. It really will take more than technology for us to make a place for ourselves in the modern galaxy. Our people are going to have to be reeducated from the ground up in things they once picked up from the culture without having to be taught."

"Yeah, that's the long-range problem. But for now, our immediate concern is that we really are looking at the kind of clandestine high-level double-dealing in the intelligence community that people used to get their jollies fantasizing about. Good God, Katy, how many ends can Havelock really be playing against the middle?"

"I don't know. All I'm sure of is that we haven't learned the full extent of it yet."

"No, we haven't. And we can't do a damned thing about it." Roark stood up slowly, as though very tired. "Katy, I need a drink."

She looked at him sharply. It was the first time he'd used that exact combination of words since they'd set up housekeeping together, and he'd partaken only in self-consciously metered moderation. She started to open her mouth to caution him . . . but what came out was, "So do I."

"Coming up." Roark started to turn toward the kitchenette.

With a roar, and a stench of burning plastic, a ring of flame as blinding as burning magnesium erupted around the door's security lock. Before the human nervous system could react, a six-inch circle of plastic enclosing the lock, its edges blackened and ragged, fell away and two figures—human, male, unknown to Roark—smashed the door in, taking a tiny instant to get their bearings in the room as they brought up small hand-weapons Roark recognized as spring needlers.

Even as Roark's brain was absorbing all this, his body was acting for him, dropping to the floor and roaring something inarticulate that included the two syllables, "Katy!" It wasn't necessary, for at the same instant she was tumbling forward, taking her chair with her so that it covered her as she landed on her hands and knees. One of the intruders opened up on her as she went over. Several needlelike flechettes stitched through the back of the chair. She screamed as one of them lacerated her scalp.

The other attacker was bringing his needler into line with Roark's head.

Roark swept up a small end table by one of its legs and flung it clumsily from his crouched position. It missed, and wouldn't have done any damage even if it had connected. But it threw the man's aim off, and the needle missed by inches. It gave Roark time to gather his leg muscles and spring before the semiautomatic needler could get off another shot.

He was in mid-spring when the second needle lanced through fleshy part of his upper left arm. It was only a dimly sensed stinging impact at the edges of his time-accelerated consciousness. Drilled-in techniques for keeping it there clicked automatically into place, allowing him to function. He crashed into his attacker, grappling with him, grabbing the wrist of his gun hand with his own weakened left hand.

Off to the side, some detached and time-accelerated part of him observed, Katy had flung herself backwards, carrying the chair with her, ramming it into the man who'd fired at her and pushing him back against the door frame. He was still there, struggling to free himself from the confining chair legs, as Roark wrestled his own opponent back against the wall beside the door. The man tried to bring the needler around and press it against the side of Roark's head. Pain shrieked in Roark as he made his left arm force that hand back, and in the very act of overcoming that pain he summoned up a surge of strength that slammed the gun hand to the wall just as its trigger finger convulsed. The needle entered the other assassin's head just under the left ear, at an upward angle; his right eyeball exploded outward with the force of its exit. Otherwise, his face merely wore a look of surprise as he slid down to the floor.

Katy struggled out from under the chair and rose unsteadily to her feet, blood from her scalp wound matting her hair and streaming down her face. She managed to grip the right wrist of Roark's opponent, lending her strength to his efforts to hold the gun hand pinned to the wall. Roark brought a knee sharply up, eliciting a strangled cry of pain and breaking the deadlock. The needler dropped to the floor. An elementary judo move sufficed to bring the man's right arm behind his back and painfully up, forcing him to go to his knees to avoid dislocating his shoulder. Roark forced him the rest of the way down, flat onto his stomach, and planted a knee in the small of his back to assure that he'd stay there.

Katy scooped up one of the fallen needlers and held it on Roark's captive. Roark spoke to her raggedly, for waves of pain were lapping over the barrier of his ability to hold them at bay. "Katy, call Svyatog. Tell him to send his security types." The act of speaking seemed to release a fresh onset of pain. Reality wavered as he glanced down at his blood. He commanded himself to steadiness. "Tell him we've got a prisoner for interrogation."

The man on the floor managed to turn his head around far enough to bring one eye to bear on Roark. It was blue, Roark noticed, now that he had time to notice individual details of the men who'd sought his life and Katy's. Her assailant was dark in a Mediterranean or Semitic sort of way. But this guy was pure redneck, and so was his speech. "Maybe that's what you think, you pig-fucker! See you in hell!" And his pain-twisted smile took on a look of triumph just before he bit down, hard, in a way Roark recognized but hadn't been prepared for.

Frantically, he rolled the Eagleman over onto his back and pried his jaws open—not too difficult, as his muscles were already going slack. He thrust a finger down the man's throat, to force him to disgorge whatever the hollow tooth had contained. But it was no use. He was dead by the time Svyatog's security personnel arrived.

 

Just as he had gazed at the remote-control unit the day before, Svyatog'Korth examined the spring needler. Then he turned to the two humans across his desk. "I gather this weapon is not unfamiliar to you."

Roark nodded dully and spoke mechanically. Lokaron first aid had gotten their wounds under control, and their artificially stimulated healing was proceeding at a rate unheard-of on this planet. But nothing could prevent them from being shaken. And they were both short of sleep. "It uses a gas-operated spring. No propellants, no electronics—so all the components can be disguised as something innocuous, even to your scanners. That, and the fact that it's silent, has always made it popular for black ops."

"But I gather it wasn't issued to you."

"No. I guess only the Eaglemen got them. Same goes for that hollow tooth." Roark forced his numb brain to try to function. "Couldn't you have revived him? He hadn't been dead long."

"We tried, of course, and got some response from the body. But the poison was evidently designed with that possibility in mind—it was a nerve agent that worked directly on the higher neural functions. His memory was already gone."

"Who the hell were they?"

"Newly inducted employees. Evidently your Mr. Havelock had additional strings to his bow." Even in his current state, Roark admired the translator's facility with English idioms. Equally impressive was the way it conveyed Svyatog's gloom. "Naturally, we cannot be sure they are the only Eaglemen who've arrived since you did. Nor am I prepared to assume that they are, having learned my lesson about underestimating these people." Roark suspected that the word people represented a bit of diplomacy on the translator's part. "At any rate, there is really no warrant for the assumption we've been making that these assassins were Eaglemen. They could have been legitimate agents of the American government, dispatched by Havelock in his official capacity."

Katy shook herself out of her torpor. "How did they know where we were? And how did they get to us there? Damn it, you promised—"

"I'm aware of what I promised," Svyatog cut her off bleakly. "And I abase myself for my failure to protect you. All I can say in my own defense is that a new factor has come into play." The alien gathered his thoughts—Roark had come to recognize that look. "The assassins took care to use only items of local manufacture, smuggled in by themselves, in the actual attack." He indicated the needler. "Even the compound they used to burn away your lock was a binary propellant whose two components, when separate, did not activate our chemical scanners. But, as you surmise, nothing of local origin would have enabled them to penetrate our security and reach your quarters. For that, they needed inside help."

Katy spoke while Roark was still trying to make sense of Svyatog's words. "Inside help? You mean . . . Lokaron help?"

"There is no other possible explanation. We have deduced how they did it. The details are unimportant. Suffice it to say that it is beyond any present human technology."

"But . . . who . . . ?"

"Who else? Gev-Rogov, of course."

"But why?"

"Unknown. They're not necessarily helping either the American government or the Eaglemen, as such. We're agreed that Havelock's agenda and theirs may not be the same."

Roark made himself think through the implications of what he'd heard. He looked nightmare in the face.

Katy's voice seemed to come from a great distance. "Svyatog, you can go before your fellow Lokaron with this. You can expose the Rogovon for—"

"No. The Rogovon have covered their tracks too well. Their involvement is as unprovable as it is obvious. They would simply deny it."

"But surely you can do something!"

"Oh, I'll inform Huruva. But he will be unable to make any use of the information—except, of course, to tighten up what has proven to be our laughably inadequate security."

"Isn't that a little like locking the barn door after the horse has run off? And is your tightened security going to suffice to assure our survival? Maybe in some area of the Enclave that's better defended—"

"No. I will be completely candid. With Havelock using the resources of both the American government and the Eaglemen to seek your lives, and Gev-Rogov aiding him, I cannot guarantee your safety anywhere on this planet."

Well, Roark thought with an odd calmness, I should have left well enough alone. I'm not staring at nightmare anymore. I'm inside it, living it, and there's no waking up. 

As she often did, Katy regained the power of speech before he did. "All right, Svyatog, what's the punch line? Surely you're offering us some alternative to a death sentence."

"Death sentence?" The translator conveyed puzzlement.

"Well, if you can't keep us alive, what hope have we?"

"But I haven't said this."

"In a pig's eye you haven't!" snapped Roark, irritated at the Lokar for being so uncharacteristically dense. "Your exact words were that you couldn't guarantee our safety anywhere . . . on . . . " His voice ran slowly down as he realized what he was saying.

"On this planet," Katy finished for him in a voice that said she, too, had figured it out.

Svyatog spoke briskly. "My private shuttle can be ready to depart in a few hours, to rendezvous in orbit with an interstellar vessel." He looked down on them from his great height, with his luminous amber eyes. "I promised to safeguard your lives. And I make a point of keeping my promises. But I can no longer do so if you remain here. Therefore, if you wish to remain under my protection, you must accept the offer I am now making: to transport you offworld, where you will be beyond—far beyond—your enemies' reach."

Roark stared at the being across the desk, and a chill ran through him. He had fancied that he was getting used to Svyatog, adjusting to his alienness, settling into a kind of spurious familiarity. Now he saw the Lokar with soul-shaking clarity, not as an individual who could be dealt with once one got past his physical oddities, but as the embodiment of forces beyond human aspiration.

"Uh, where exactly do you propose to take us?" Katy managed to keep her voice steady to the end of the question, then yielded to a nervous laugh that almost rose to a giggle. "Not that we'd know the difference!"

"I had in mind Harath-Asor, the homeworld of my gevah. I think you'll find it . . . interesting. And while it is several hundred light-years away as you measure interstellar distances, the actual travel time is quite reasonable. The fact that we are able to conduct interstellar commerce on a profitable basis should tell you that much."

"Will you be taking us there yourself?"

"No. I have to remain here a while longer. But you'll be in good hands. And I'll be joining you there presently."

Roark shook free of the oppressive sense of tininess that had crept over him and rejoined the conversation. "Wait a minute. Wait a minute! This is getting altogether too matter-of-fact. Are you saying that if we want to survive we have to give up our homeworld forever?" His eyes strayed to the waning Virginia autumn outside the office's transparencies.

"By no means. I have reason to believe that your . . . exile, if you insist, will be only temporary."

"But still," Roark persisted, "you're asking us to—"

"To be the first two human beings to venture beyond the moon!" What he heard in Katy's voice brought Roark's head around. Her face was transfigured. "To see what others have only dreamed! Ben, this is a chance no one has ever been offered!"

"In addition to being the only way to save our buns." But Roark's cynicism was sheer habit. His grin matched hers. Their hands found each other and clasped.

Svyatog looked from one of them to the other. They were in no mood to notice that his face wore the arch-looking (to humans) expression that was a Lokaron smile.

 

Their hands were tightly clasped once again as they sat in the Lokaron shuttle, watching the interstellar transport grow from toy to intricate artificial mountain in the view forward.

The shuttle's drive converted the angular momentum of spinning atomic particles into linear thrust in a manner beyond the compass of Earth's science, but it wasn't magic—the way takeoff had pressed Roark and Katy down into their acceleration couches had left no room for doubt on that score. It hadn't been as bad as it might have been, though, for the craft was designed for beings whose native gravity was 0.72 G, and its freedom from any need for reaction mass allowed it to take its time accelerating up to orbit. There, things got worse, with the alternating acceleration and weightlessness that accompanied the rendezvous maneuvering. But then they got better and stayed that way, for the Lokaron could generate artificial gravity fields. Such a field clamped comfortingly down on them as the shuttle slid through some kind of nonmaterial barrier into the great ship's cavernous docking bay and settled onto the deck. They emerged, inarticulate with wonder, and gazed at the cloud-marbled blue curve of Earth outside that wide opening that seemed so impossibly open to vacuum.

After a moment, an approaching figure drew their attention from that spectacle. It was a Lokaron of the medium-blue Harathon subspecies, wearing the "business suit" of loose sleeveless robe over double-breasted tunic, all in subdued reddish shades. When he spoke, the translator produced the same perfect English in which it rendered Svyatog's speech . . . but not in the same voice, which came as no surprise given what they already knew of the software's sophistication.

"I am Thrannis'Woseg, an employee of Hov-Korth. Svyatog'Korth has assigned me to attend to your needs during the journey, which I trust you will find comfortable."

Katy, the more experienced of the two in dealing with the Lokaron, spoke for them. "Yes, thank you. The artificial gravity is a great help—at least until the ship departs."

"It has, in fact, already done so." Thrannis indicated the entry port. The blue planet below was no longer motionless, but seemed to be drifting at an accelerating rate. "The ship's departure was delayed until your arrival, and the captain is eager to make up the lost time."

The evidence of Svyatog's pull held no surprise. But . . . "Thrannis, shouldn't we be feeling the acceleration?"

"No. The ship is designed in such a way that `down' equals `aft.' The artificial gravity is under the control of the central computer, which reduces it to correspond with the drive's current acceleration. So apparent weight is constant."

And hadn't fluctuated in the slightest. . . . But, Roark told himself, such things were to be expected. Before entering the shuttle and the Lokaron world it represented, he'd steeled himself against mental vertigo. That, like so much good advice, was evidently going to be easier to give than to follow.

"And now," Thrannis continued, "let me show you to your quarters."

"Uh, wait a minute, Thrannis," said Roark, a little desperately. "First, can't we go someplace where we can watch as . . . as . . . " He gestured vaguely toward the portal, where Earth was no longer visible. The realization hit him: by departing Earth orbit he and Katy had already gone further than any humans had in their lifetimes. Aside from robot probes, the United States government had unofficially turned its back on deep space after the last Apollo missions, a generation before the EFP had made it official.

"Ah!" The translator conveyed Thrannis' dawning understanding. "You wish to watch as your world recedes. Don't worry, you'll have ample time. At this modest acceleration, our velocity is building only gradually. And your cabin viewscreen can give you a view aft. You'll find that all your cabin functions will respond to voice commands in your language." He paused, giving the two humans a chance to contemplate the kind of reprogramming he'd implied so offhandedly, performed in the brief time since Svyatog had known they'd be taking passage aboard this ship. "However, when we arrive at the transition gate, you may wish to make use of the ship's more elaborate observation facilities. I believe you'll find transition . . . impressive. Or, at least, completely foreign to your experience."

"Yes, I think we just might," Roark acknowledged as Thrannis led them away.

 

The advent of the Lokaron had demonstrated the existence of extraterrestrial life to the satisfaction of even the most skeptical. It had also laid to rest the conventional wisdom that interstellar flight, while perhaps not impossible in an absolute sense, was inherently impractical. Unfortunately, a decade later, no one on Earth was entirely clear on how they did it. They themselves hadn't been altogether helpful. They'd hastened to assure anxious human physicists that, yes, Einstein had been quite right, as far as he went, and that their ships didn't violate the lightspeed limit but merely evaded it. But they'd been unable—or, some suspected, unwilling—to explain in any intelligible way just how this was done. The information they'd doled out had provided more questions than answers.

The unambiguous facts were these: there was a higher space, congruent in some mysterious way with our own, in which points in our space—or, rather, the points corresponding to those points—were far closer together. The Lokaron translators called it "overspace," a label which might or might not be deliberately misleading. Entering or departing from it—"transition"—required the creation of a multidimensional "tunnel" in spacetime. A ship could carry an engine that wrapped such a tunnel around itself—an engine so massive, and such an energy hog, as to render the ship that carried it unable to earn its keep as a carrier of cargo or passengers. Military ships, and the exploration ships that pushed the frontiers of Lokaron space ever outward, mounted such engines. But for commercial uses, there was another way: the "transition gate," which produced the same effect externally to itself, creating a tunnel for other objects to pass through. This was even more technology- and energy-intensive than the shipboard transition engines. But it made interstellar traffic an economically viable proposition, for once in place it could be used by any and all ships that could reach it . . . like the ship that Roark and Katy now rode.

Reaching it took time, for transition was impossible in a significant gravity field and so Gev-Harath, like the other gevahon, had built its transition gate in an orbit skirting the inner fringes of the asteroid belt. It was currently almost seventy degrees ahead of Earth as they both circled the sun. But at a constant acceleration and deceleration of almost one Lokaron G, little more than two ship's days (the thirty-nine-plus-hour days of their destination world, to which they adjusted with difficulty) passed before Thrannis told them it was time.

He led them to a circular chamber whose domed overhead was a viewscreen, as though it was open to the stars. The few Lokaron present stared at them with frank curiosity as they settled uncomfortably into loungers which, unlike their own cabin's furnishings, had not been designed for humans. Nearby was a small auxiliary pickup showing the view aft, including the little light-blue dot that was Earth. Above their heads was the view forward. The ship had flipped over and decelerated for the second half of the journey, to arrive here at a velocity at which it could maneuver. But now it was forging ahead again, toward the tunnel the transition gate had bored through the structure of reality.

So far there was nothing to see. The gate's physical plant was small, and there was little sunlight out here for it to reflect anyway. And the nonmaterial tunnel would not become visible until they began to enter it. They waited in edgy silence.

Then a chime sounded. The two humans, who'd been warned what to expect, emulated their Lokaron fellow spectators and settled into the loungers in preparation for acceleration. Roark stole a glance at the small viewscreen to the side. Earth was still there: blue, lovely. . . .

Without further warning, the ship surged—not pushed by its drive, but pulled by forces that accompanied transition—and they were pressed down into the recliners. At the same time, the stars directly above them—and therefore directly ahead of the ship—faded out, or rather were pulled down to merge with those around the sides and flow sternward, forming a tunnel of light that ran through the visible spectrum before vanishing. Then their weight was normal again and there was only blackness in the dome above them. The ship was in the enigmatic realm of overspace, where it could navigate only by the high-tech lanterns of the Lokaron beacon network, and from which it could emerge only through another transition gate.

But a split second before that, Roark's eyes had gone back to the auxiliary screen, in which the waterspout of scintillating colors was streaming backward toward the little blue spark. Then that screen, too, was black, and the spark was extinguished.

He saw that Katy was also staring at the infinitely deep well into which their world had fallen and vanished. Then their eyes met, and there were no words, for none had been invented—at least not in English or any other Earthly tongue.

 

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