Jill had spent most of the racing drive back to the ship checking on its operating condition as exhaustively as she could from the car. She discovered nothing wrong with it. Condition was normal. Ultimate sensor scan reported the vicinity clear of suspicious objects.
The aircar's scanners showed the same innocuous picture as she approached the ship. She slowed, gave the recognition code, read the ship's acknowledgment on the tape, set the code on continuous repetition, and moved up to the defense perimeter.
The ship's screens remained off. Everything seemed all right. She bit her lip, gave the signal for the entry lock to open for the car, saw it opening in the viewplate.
The car slid forward into the defense zone.
The world seemed to dim, almost imperceptibly. Jill grew aware of a sound.
It hung about her like the half-heard vibration of a bell, a shuddering in the air. Dreaminess settled on her. Then came jarring fright.
"No!"
The dreaminess was gone. But the aircar was growing vague, fading out in a gray haze. She tried to wrench herself back into its reality, knew she was failing, reached out automatically for the hazy Suesvant on the car door. For an instant, she seemed to touch nothing; then the stock grew firm and cool against her palm, and she snatched the rifle to her. The car controls
She was no longer in the car. She saw its shadow shape ahead of her in a darkening fog, moving toward the ship. And the ship expanded suddenly into a ball of yellow fire. An explosion which had no sound for Jill. The shadow car vanished in the fire, and the fog closed all around.
She was in nothingness. But she was real. The Suesvant she held had remained real with her.
Otherwiseno sight, no sound. The fog was no fog but the absence of other realities. It had no substance, no temperature. Nothing.
But she was there. She could look down and see herself as if by daylight, hands gripping the rifle. Her lungs breathed, ignoring the fact that logically they should find nothing to breathe. She cleared her throat, heard the sound.
In its way, it began to make sense. If the bipeds used this as a form of transportation, the process itself mustn't hurt her, was nothing to fear. Danger wouldn't develop until it released her again.
A little time passed. Then the fog seemed to be thinning. Jill had waited for that. She pressed the alert button on her wrist transmitter. "Ned?"
No response. Light of sorts appeared gradually about her.
She was within something now. A structure. A long hall with metal walls. Nothing else to be seen. It was like looking through water. She was in motion, drifting along the hall, then slanting toward one of the walls. She touched the wall without sensing the touch, went through it
And was in a vast room. Again there was the metal gleam of enclosing walls, great sleek engines below, moving shapes vaguely seen in the distance beyond the engines. Sound reached her here, the surging hum of power. She turned over and over like a tumbling leaf, was swirled down toward the central engine and into it. Light blazed briefly through her closed lids; furious energies quivered about her . . . then she was out of that incredible hell, unhurt, untouched. Moving on. More swiftly. A biped appeared suddenly ahead, standing on a catwalk, staring at her. He raised a big arm as if startled by her approach and trying to ward her off. Four-armed? Was he four-armed? She couldn't be certain in a momentary blurred glance. As she swung up the Suesvant, she'd passed through him, gone on through another wall.
A ghost. Moving through sections of the subterranean Kulkoor civilization they'd theorized? It didn't seem so. What she saw here suggested a vital, powerful technology, one that stood openly and boldly on its world, prepared to face any intrudernot the remnants of an advanced but failing culture which must skulk spitefully underground when visitors arrived from the stars. She began to get glimpses of other bipeds. Sometimes they seemed briefly aware of her, sometimes not. Four-armed they were. Why had she failed to notice so significant a detail about the one she'd shot? She had the impression that most of these were smaller, slighter creatures than the giants they'd stalked, though unmistakably of the same species.
Which, of course, could no longer be considered a Kulkoor species . . . Had she been transferred to a different world? It seemed possible. At the moment, perhaps almost anything would have seemed possible.
Abruptly the fog grew dense again. For moments only. When it began to fade, Jill knew what the aimless drifting had been about. A temporary delay only because they'd been busy with other matters. Other prisoners.
For here was an execution chamber.
It was a small room compared with most of the rest she'd passed through, long and low-ceilinged. Something like a great ventilator grille stretched overhead. One of the big bipeds stood at the far end of the room, looking in her direction. He held a short tubular device in one hand. Against the side of the room was a pile of contorted charred objects. Jill looked at them once and didn't look again.
Did the executioner recognize the Suesvant as a weapon which might be dangerous to him? With her first understanding of where she was, why she was here, Jill had let the rifle down at her side, holding it loosely in one hand, as she stared at the watching biped.
He turned his head; she heard a muted bellowing. The fog thinned farther; she felt a lurch, stood suddenly on the hard flooring of the room, smelled the stench of burned flesh the air rushing through the chamber hadn't yet carried off. The biped was leveling his fire tube.
The Suesvant was leveled much faster. The executioner didn't wear a body screen. He was dead as two slugs smashed him back against the wall.
Now what? Jill thought.
In answer, the fog enclosed her again. Again, things went swirling past, vaguely glimpsed. She was back in the immaterial half-world. The chamber had vanished instantly, but now a landscape was emerging about her, below her. A wraith of a landscape, pale, without color. Nevertheless, she recognized the formation of those shadowy mountain ranges at once and knew she was on Kulkoor. When she looked down, there was a lake below herfar down, at least two thousand feet. The glacier lake which formed the northern border of the area where they'd tracked two bipeds and she'd shot one. She looked in the direction from which she seemed to have come. There, within the shadow bulk of a mountain ridge, lay a shape, a huge oblong shape, tapering to a point at one end.
A ship, Jill thought. A gigantic spaceship, lying within the mountain. Four-arms had come to Kulkoor from a world of a distant star . . .
As she stared at the ship, its outlines faded. The mountains about her, the lake below, began to acquire color and solidity. For an instant, there was the brush of cold wind, a flash of brilliant daylight. She reached quickly for the alert button of the wrist transmitter, pressed it. She'd been returned to the world of reality, to die there. A two-thousand-foot drop to the lake would be a simple way to dispose of an unexpectedly recalcitrant prisoner.
But there might be time . . .
Somewhere then, somebody's mind changed; and the fog enclosed her again.
And this then was the control deck of the great ship. It could be nothing else. It was correspondingly huge, about a fifth of it filled with instrument banks, arranged before a curving viewscreen along wall and ceiling. The wall on the left showed what seemed to be outlines of the layered decks of the ship, about forty, their shifting light and color patterns signaling information to the control deck. A relative few of the instruments were manned. In all, around thirty bipeds were in sight, two of them the giant type. The others weren't of much more than human height. With their lighter build, their weight might be barely a fourth that of the giants.
Jill had been stopped near the center of the deck. A number of bipeds stood about, staring at her. The fog effect seemed very slight, but she knew she was still separated from them. Her feet seemed to be touching the floor, but when she took a step forward, her position on the deck didn't change. She held the Suesvant ready for use. The two big bipeds were armed. The others weren't.
Within a minute, the reason she was here was made apparent. The entire wall on the right side of the control deck became a viewscreen. Through it, Jill was looking into another room, as high-ceilinged as this one, though less wide. A dozen of the smaller bipeds stood and moved about there. Behind them was a specimen of a third biped varietyone which shrank the mighty ogres into insignificance. Seated human fashion in a great chair, it had the bulk of one of Earth's dinosaurs. Standing, it would have topped twenty-five feet.
She'd been brought here to be looked over by this four-armed entityShip's Captain, Being in Charge, sitting in a command room before a set of instruments designed for its proportions. Did it ever leave the room? Probably. Much of the ship was shaped for hugeness. It was the Suesvant they were interested in, of course. She'd demonstrated again what it could do, in executing their executioner. They wanted the weapon for study. The Being in Charge eyed her a long minute from the screen; then its voice boomed briefly. The viewscreen went blank, became again a wall of the control deck. Her fate had been decided.
The control deck faded from sight.
Grant picked up the dead biped's heat weapon. It was heavy; he needed both hands to hold it and aim it at the body above him on the slope. He thumbed down the stud, and the body and the ground about it blazed furiously. When the biped's fellows came searching for it, they should find something of a mystery to brood about, for a change. Grant shut off the device, clipped its end to his belt. It was an awkward weight; but the thing could be useful again. He picked up the fur vest he'd pulled off the body. Its sealed pockets were crammed with a variety of articles which might be investigated in detail at another time. Two of them, however, were gray pear-shaped instruments of the kind the biped had been holding in its hand. Emergency spares. It wouldn't have cared to find itself suddenly without a working device of that type available to it.
Their personal transportation method. Grant didn't know what limitations there might be on its effective range, but that information wasn't important now. He'd found out what he needed to know. The brain supplied directions; the gray instrument did what it did. You visualized the place you wanted to be, or you'd find yourself simply floating in the fogs of nowhere as your finger came down into the instrument's hollowed tip, closed contact. But visualize the place, and you went there. You emerged quickly or slowly, as you chose. Or you didn't emerge at all, remained just within nowhere, a ghost, a near-invisibility, peering out into a shadow world.
A very practical device. He'd tested it during the past few minutes, had made a number of longer shifts back and forth across the slope. Ready now for a purposeful jump . . . He hung the biped's vest over his left arm, took the gray instrument in his right hand, closed contact.
Fog swept in, thinned. He halted the process mentally. He was inside a room, vaguely defined but recognizable. It was in the Medical Section of the Star Union Base; he and Jill and Ned had been taken there to see the bodies of the people killed in Station Three. No one around at present. Grant came out of the fringes of nowhere into the room . . .
Into a storm of sound! Siren blaring in the air, sinking to an angry whine. Thud of energy bolts. A Suesvant's flat hard crack
"Jill was to bring the ship here," Ned said, wiping sweat from his face. "They may have got her."
"What makes you think so?"
"Grant, I'm not saying they have! I don't know! I had an alert signal from her not more than ten minutes ago. I couldn't acknowledge. The bipeds were trying to break throughforcing it. They're getting impatient. I tried to contact Jill first chance I got. I've kept the alert button down. She hasn't replied."
"Ten minutes . . . how long can you hold out here?"
Crowell said, "They'll finish it any time they quit worrying about what it costs. Four car guns and the north turret left. At the present level of attack, we might last half an hour or more."
"One of you come along," Grant told them. "I have two spares of that space jumping gadget. We can do something with that."
"Your job," Ned said to Crowell. He looked at Grant, tapped the Suesvant. "This could make an additional quarter hour's difference here. You go after Jill."
Crowell and Grant ran across the square, past the living and dead, almost ignored by the Base's diminished survivors. Only a few facespale, sweat-streaked, shockedturned to look after them. In the room in the Medical Section, Grant took the biped's two spares from the fur vest, handed one to Crowell, snapped the heat weapon back on his belt.
"I'll see about Jill as soon as you know how to use it," he said. "Here's what you do"
When Grant went back into the nowhere fog, visualizing the Galestral ship's control room, nothing happened immediately. Then the fog darkened. A rumbling earthquake sensation began, building up quickly in violence. Grant had an awareness of imminent, ultimate danger. His mind snatched at another visualization. For a moment, that seemed to alter nothing. Then the rumbling faded. The fog thinned, vanished. The dangling fire weapon slapped heavily against his thigh. Grant slipped the transporting device into his pocket, looked quickly around.
He stood under the overhang of a great cliff, fallen boulders about him, a rounded shallow valley below, mountains lifting above the forest beyond the valley.
This was the point where they'd left Jill stationed when they prepared to ambush the biped. He'd needed a place to which he could retreat safely; and his mind had produced this picture, brought him here. It seemed a good choice. A familiar area, free at the moment of bipeds, screened from the observation of bipeds. Animals were in view in the valley, browsing undisturbed. The cliffs and the tumbled boulders concealed him.
He should have gone to their ship's control room. He had a strong conviction that instead he'd nearly been projected into a final nothingness. The control room no longer existed. Their ship no longer existed. He was being drawn into nonexistence when he'd veered away to this other place . . .
Ghost biped, prowling about the ship's defense perimeter as their aircar approached. It could look into the ship's opening lock. It could project itself later into the lock. From then on, an unseen presence moved occasionally about the ship. The ship had become alien property. When the aliens no longer had a use for it, it was destroyed.
And Jill
He couldn't think of Jill as dead, as nonexistent. The bipeds took captives, had tried to take her captive earlier today.
Grant slipped his hand back into his pocket, closed it about the transporting device. He brought Jill's face into his mind, pictured it a few feet from his own. He kept the picture there as he pressed his finger into the indentation at the tip of the instrument.
Fog condensed, thinned.
The first thing he saw then wasn't Jill. It was the round black muzzle of a Suesvant pointed at him. The Suesvant was jerked aside.
"Grant!" A thin whisper.
Small bare cube of a room with seamless metal walls and nothing that looked like a door. Jill was staring at him, eyes huge in a chalk-white face.