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There was a confusion of screams and cries, and then, as though a great gust of wind had picked them up like grains of dust, the people moved all together toward the ship's main hatch. Kirby grabbed Shari back out of the way, yelling as loud as he could at them to keep their heads. Some of the men were trying to stem the rush but it was not doing any good. The mob streamed up the ramp, jammed and squeezed and popped like corks in through the hatchway, and were gone.

Pop Barstow came out from under the ramp where he had taken refuge, and a minute or two later three men and then a couple more came back out of the hatch, looking sheepish.

Pop Barstow chuckled. "Didn't know they could move so fast, did you, Kirby?" He added, "They're real bugged by that message, and I got to admit, so am I. The worst of it's not knowing what the danger is."

Krejewski was among the men, and Wilson. They came up to Kirby. "Did you see the light?"

"No. But we better look for it. Got your shockers?"

They went together through the circle of fires, into the outer night. Shari did not move, standing with her eyes shut. Suddenly she cried out,

"Kirby, wait!"

She ran after them between the fires. Kirby caught her. He pointed out into the black void. A beam of light showed. It shot up strongly from the ground, and then wavered erratically, and fell. It seemed to be about a quarter of a mile away. The men swore uneasily. Wilson said, "What do you suppose that is?"

Shari said, "It's Marapese."

Kirby stared down at her in the darkness. "What? But a minute ago—"

"A minute ago he was not there. Now he is."

"Marapese," said Wilson. He looked in the direction of the light, and then in the direction of the forest where they had last seen him. "How did he get there?"

"Well," said Kirby, "let's go get him." He patted Shari. "Go on back to the ship and tell 'em. That'll quiet them down."

Shari said acidly, "I doubt if they will believe me, but I'll try."

Kirby and the others went out across the plain. They had pocket torches, but even so they stumbled heavily in the tangled grasses and the clumps of sturdy weed. The distant light flared up again, and again was lost.

Krejewski said, "He's using his torch to signal. He must be hurt or something. Why didn't he just walk the rest of the way?"

They speculated uselessly on the whys and wherefores of Marapese's condition. The light was farther off than they had thought, but presently they came up to it. It was Marapese. He was sitting down holding the torch between his hands and then dropping it in a peculiarly childish way, as though he kept forgetting what he was doing with it. He let out a wild yell when the men came up, and then he stared at Kirby and the others as though he couldn't remember who they were. He did not seem to be hurt. His clothing was muddy and his hair was wet, but beyond that he was all right, at least physically.

Kirby knelt down beside him. "Joe." he said. "It's me, Kirby. Joe, look here."

Joe looked. Then he began to cry.

Kirby shook him. "Stop that. Shut it up."

Marapese's teeth came together with an audible clack. "I'm cold," he said. "I'm all wet."

Kirby looked at his own hands. He had used them to shake the boy, and there was mud on them, still fresh. "Where'd you get this?" he asked Marapese. "What happened to you?"

"I don't know."

Something quivered inside Kirby. He had heard Shari use those same words too often. "Look," he said. "You wandered away from us in the woods. You went somewhere. Where?"

"I didn't," said Marapese, and made a series of unpleasant hic-ing sounds in his throat. Kirby shook him again.

"Come on, now. Tell me about it."

"I didn't go anywhere! I just went for one minute behind a tree, and I wasn't ten feet away from Wils and Hanawalt. They were trying to get one of the chainsaws going. And I wasn't there anymore."

"What do you mean, you weren't there anymore?"

"I was in another place, that's what I mean! One minute I was behind the tree, and the next minute there wasn't any tree and I was up to my knees in water in a damned great swamp, and none of the guys were around."

Wilson snorted. Marapese had not believed in his animal, and he was not going to believe Marapese's miraculous translation in space. "You wandered off like a idiot and fell in a bog, that's all."

But Kirby, who was cold all through now with an icy chill that was not borne on any wind, fingered the wet mud on his palm and asked, "How did you get here, Joe? Did you walk?"

"No," said Marapese. "I just . . . came."

"Like it happened before? You were there, and then you were here, just like that?"

"Yeah."

"You didn't black out any time?"

"No. I wandered around the swamp all day, trying to find my way out. I couldn't figure it, and I was scared, but I didn't black out. Then it got dark."

He lapsed into a violent fit of shivering, and when he spoke again his words were punctuated by the chattering of his teeth.

"Then I was really scared. I thought I was going to die there and nobody would ever find me. I kept wallowing around, falling over things, and then here I was."

His voice went up a couple of octaves, until it sounded like a girl's. "Look, if you don't believe me, my clothes are still wet. Look at my boots. I didn't get all that gunk on them walking across a dry plain."

"You know," said Krejewski on a note of pure awe, "that's true."

They looked out into the great dark, and Wilson muttered, "First the radio, and then the saws, and now this, and you can't explain any of them."

Kirby said bitterly, "Ad astra per ardua, remember? Well, we've had the ardua, plenty of it, more than enough. It isn't fair!" he shouted, out into the night, out toward the forest and the far-off peaks. "It isn't fair, damn you!"

He started to haul Marapese to his feet, not gently at all but roughly and cursing while he did it in a fumbling sort of way, not picking his words well. "You can't fight everything. It was hard enough to get here—we had a right to some breaks."

Krejewski came up on the other side of Marapese. "Okay, Kirby, I'll give you a hand."

They slogged back over the plain, half leading, half carrying Marapese, whose clothes were drying on him fast now in the wind, as though to bear him out. Kirby had stopped cursing. His teeth were shut tight together and he put each foot down hard, stamp, and then stamp again, as though he were marching someplace to a driving music no one else could hear. After a long while he asked Marapese a question.

"Where was this swampy place?"

"I don't know. Somewhere in the forest, I guess. It felt like a long way off."

"See anything there?"

"Trees, all dead. Mud and water and reeds."

"Anything else? Anything alive?"

Marapese did not answer.

"Well, did you?"

"I didn't see anything. But I thought I heard things moving around, and some of the things I fell over."

He began to cry again, dismally, like a frightened child.

"They weren't there, Kirby. I'd stumble, and then whatever in heaven it was would be gone."

The night was huge and dark, and the wind blew wide over the prairie. The men began to walk very fast toward the fires, dragging Marapese with them.

Most of the people were still inside the ship. They got Marapese down to the cargo deck, where his family took him over in a setting of tired pandemonium. Nobody, apparently, had any thought of sleep. Children cried, and there was a noise of talking as incessant as the sound of running water. It did not abate as the men told the story of Marapese.

Kirby took Shari outside into the corridor and told it to her. "It sounds like something I've read or heard about," he said. "Something with a name."

She gave him a Martian word that meant something like "thought-moving", and he said, "Teleportation. That's it. Well, I suppose if you can see atomic structure, moving things around wouldn't be too difficult." He shivered. "I sometimes think the crackpots were right and God never meant us to make the stars. Everything's against us. R-ships, and now super-beings with a psi power as big as all outdoors. How are you going to fight that?"

From the open hatch came the sound of a woman's voice crying out to somebody, ". . . brought us here without knowing whether this world was safe or not!"

A man's voice answered miserably, "We thought we knew. There was nothing to make us doubt it."

"You thought you knew," the woman repeated slowly. "Oh, my God."

Wilson stuck his head through the hatch and said to Kirby, "I think you better come down."

Wearily Kirby did so. They had been ripening for trouble all day, and Marapese's weird adventure was the final push. Out of the crowd somebody said angrily,

"Fenner says you told him not to broadcast our position to the R-ship."

"That's right," Kirby said. "I did."

There was a muted sort of howl, and Sally Wilson's voice rang out clearly, "You're not giving the orders any more. We'll make up our own minds this time, whether we want to live or die."

"I only thought," said Kirby, with a mildness he did not feel, "that the position should not be given until everybody had had a chance to think about it." He climbed up the ladder a few rungs and tried to get the attention of the whole group, "Will you quiet down and listen to me for a minute? This is the biggest decision you'll ever make in your lives. Don't make it too hastily. The R-ship—"

"Decision!" somebody cried. "Does anybody have to think twice before they decide to save their children from a horrible death—if it isn't already too late?"

"Nobody," said Kirby, "is asking you to stay and face death. It just seems like an elementary piece of common sense to find out if we actually are facing death before we lie down and quit. We can give the R-ship our position any time up to a day before it's due to land, but once we do give it, that's it. We'll have the R-ship whether we want it or not, and it might not be so easy to get rid of."

Wilson said, "A couple of times today you talked as though you knew something, Kirby. Do you? Have you got a line on this 'unidentified element'?"

"Shari has."

"Well," said somebody nastily, "that makes it all different." In the brisk round of comment that followed Kirby discovered what he had not known before, that many of the women were jealous of Shari's power, and refused to believe in it, while others were not jealous at all but simply did not believe in it, or else felt that it was far too chancy a thing to trust.

There was a further point of view. "And of course Shari wouldn't dream of lying just to make you look good."

"I don't think she would," said Kirby. "After all, she likes living too." To Wilson he said, "There's another point. It's always been accepted that the RSS-1's report was not made public because it showed a habitable world out here and people might be tempted to try and get to it. Well, if the report showed it wasn't habitable, why not publish it, with the films and everything for proof, and settle the matter once and for all?"

"I hadn't thought of that," said Wilson. "It does seem they would have, all right. And yet there is something on this world, Kirby. It might be something—" He hesitated, and then finished. "Well, something the cameras couldn't photograph."

Mountain-without-a-face, thought Kirby, harking back to the symbolic figure of his dream. It could be without a body, too. Marapese had not seen anything.

With sullen stubbornness, he said, "I'm going to try and find out, anyway, before I throw away a wide new world just because Minor Howell doesn't want me to have it."

A small plump woman with a small plump jaw like a steel trap elbowed her way to the front. She was Fenner's wife, and she had been a radio operator herself in Civil Communications before her marriage. Kirby's heart had begun to sink before she ever opened her mouth.

"All this arguing." she said, "is beside the point. Nobody else had guts enough to take the responsibility, but I did, I broadcast the coordinates."

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Framed