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Adam followed the change, and soon after that bumped up against a wall of
something that felt like sandstone. His groping hands told him that the wall
was no more than chest high, but thicker than he could reach across.
His guide seemed to be following the wall now, moving to the right.
After a few more turns, all made following the windings of the wall, Adam saw
a yellowish light ahead. At about the same time, he and his guide emerged from
under the trees. Now the starlight showed him the being he was following, but
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only as a vague shape, the size of a man perhaps. It was ten meters or so
ahead of him and moving quite close to the ground. Whatever it might be, it
was not a human of the primate theme.
The yellow glow ahead was coming from inside a one-story building. The
structure was of a simple, flat-roofed design, with doorways and windows open
to the tropic night. It appeared to be constructed of the same rough stone as
the low wall. There was a gateway in the wall now, and they passed through it,
Adam still following his guide, toward the building's largest doorway.
"Go inside," said the tympanic voice of Adam's guide, who had now stopped at a
little distance to one side. "Go inside and look.
I want to see what effect on your parapsych theories is had by the sight of a
possible result. Did I phrase that correctly? I am not one who knows your
speech behavior well. But go and look.
Be my fellow scientist, hey?"
Adam walked toward the open doorway at the center of the low building. Inside
he could see a large, plain, stone-walled room, illuminated by the bright
yellow glow that was coming from no visible source. The room contained nothing
but a large, open pit or tank sunk into the middle of the floor and defended
by a circular low wall.
The sight of a possible result
. The Field-builders' torture chamber, or one of them. Adam paused in the
doorway, intuition
whispering to him that in this room he was going to find the half-alive
remains of Alexander Golden.
He didn't want to see that. He hoped more fiercely than ever that the next
teleportation jump would quickly come, come now, and take him out of this. But
he made himself cross the floor to the low wall around the tank, and look over
the wall and down.
"They came in past the robot picket ships ten hours ago," said
General Lorsch. For the first time in many days there was no tiredness in her
voice. Her electronic pointer flashed as it marked the location of the
sighting on the holographic model of the space around Golden. Around her the
small, dimly lighted briefing room on the command deck of the flagship was
quiet, the small group of people who filled it listening intently.
"The pickets have been following them," the General went on, "and no doubt
they are aware of that. Now they're within fifteen hundred kilometers of
planet surface, and holding position there.
We're going to surround them as best we can with our three manned ships, and
then we're going to ask them some questions.
Yes, Colonel, what is it?"
Brazil stood up in the small group of senior officers present.
"Ma'am, is an arrest certain?"
Lorsch paused for just a second before answering. "I'd say almost certain.
This is the Jovian ship, and it's illegal; we can't have people jaunting
anywhere they like in starships, involving all humanity in God knows what.
"I don't know if the Jovians intend to resist arrest. We don't know what
weapons they may have. Considering their abilities, maybe something very new
and very good." She looked around her solemnly. "We'll be three ships to one,
but, frankly, this operation may develop into a battle. We must be ready for
that."
Another officer stood up. "Boarding parties, ma'am, I
presume?"
"Correct. Colonel Brazil is going to be in command of that part of the
operation. Colonel, I want you to me right after this
meeting."
Me and my hotshot record
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, Boris thought, sitting down again.
Adam stood looking down into the tank, feeling a kind of strained, puzzled
relief, an anticlimax. Five meters below, an amphibious beast of a kind that
he had never seen before splashed and wallowed in shallow water. There was
nothing in the appearance of the beast to connect it with Alexander Golden, or
indeed with humanity in any way; rather it looked vaguely like a seal.
Assuming that the creature was native to Golden, it was hardly surprising that
Adam had never encountered a member of its species before. Golden was after
all an Earth-sized world, and he was now standing in a hemisphere of that
world that had never before been explored by Earth-descended humans.
There was a tiny splash in the water, just beside the seal-like creature. And
then another splash and then another. Something, a slow hail of small objects,
was falling into the tank.
Adam looked up at a blank stone ceiling, close above. He could see the tiny
objects materializing in the air now, a thin rain of them, looking like
pebbles, coming out of the air under the low ceiling to fall and patter around
the thing living in the tank.
Suddenly, like an animated rubber toy, the creature stretched its body
completely out of its old shape and into a new one, altering its form
completely into something like that of an octopus. Still it never at any stage
of the change looked anything like Alexander
Golden, or any other human being of Earth.
"Observe classic symptom of falling stones," boomed the guide's voice, from
somewhere in the darkness outside the building. "But do you not detect the
sickness? I thought you were a sensitive, teleporting as you were."
Adam turned to face the wide dark open doorway. All he could think of was to
try to change the subject. In his growing state of shock, ingrained
planteering methods won out again. "Will you tell me your name?" he asked.
"I am studying you, not the other way around. Co-operation, please."
"I only want to "
Afterward Adam could not remember just what he had meant to say he wanted. He
found himself sitting on the stone floor, with his back against the low wall
that guarded the tank, and with no idea of how long he had been sitting there.
He felt no pain and had no memory of any, but the feeling that he had driven
his will into some analog of a stone wall, so that his will had been bent back
upon itself. The effect was disorganizing, like an electric shock to the
central nervous system.
The guide's concussive voice, patiently curious, now repeated its question
from the outer darkness. "Do you sense the sickness of the one in the tank?
Answer, please."
It seemed wise to avoid further argument. Adam got to his feet and looked into
the tank again. No further change in the occupant was observable. "No. This
being looks strange to me.
But I can sense nothing wrong, in the sense of sickness."
Merit, Ray, where are you
?
They were nowhere, as far as he could tell.
Could he somehow have missed, been left out from, a teleportation jump?
If Adam's guide was aware of his efforts at telepathy, it did not comment on
them. "That being in the tank has deformed itself,"
the creature outside in the night explained. "Crippled its mind and body, by
using what you call parapsych forces in an attack upon another being. Such is
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