The Blind Pilot

by CHARLES HENNEBERG

The shop was low and dark, as if designed for someone who no longer knew day from night. Around it hung a scent of wax and incense, exotic woods, and roses dried in darkness. It was in the cellar of one of the oldest buildings of the old radioactive district, and you had to walk down several steps before you reached a grille of Venerian sandalwood. A cone of Martian crystal lighted the sign: THE BLIND PILOT.

The man who came in this morning, followed by a robot porter with a chest, was a half-crazy old voyager, like many who had gazed on the naked blazing of the stars. He was back from the Aselli—at least, if not from there, from the Southern Cross; his face was of wax, ravaged, graven, from lying too long in a cabin at the mercy of the ultraviolets, and in the black jungle of the planets.

The coffer was hewn from a heartwood hard as brass, porous here and there. He had it set down on the floor, and the sides vibrated imperceptibly, as if a great captive bee were struggling inside.

“Look here,” he said, giving a rap on the lid, “I wouldn’t sell that there for a million credits, but I’m needing to refloat myself, till I get my pay. They tell me you’re an honest Yahoo. I’ll leave this here in pawn and come back to get it in six days. What’ll you give me?”

At the back of the shop, a young man raised his head. He was sitting in an old armchair stiff with flowered brocade. He looked like one of those fine Velasquez cavaliers who had hands of steel, and were not ashamed to be beautiful: but a black bandage covered the upper part of his face.

“I’m no Yahoo,” he answered coldly, “and I don’t take live animals as pledges.”

“Blind! You’re blind!” stammered the newcomer,

“You saw my sign.”

“Accident?”

“Out in the Pleiades.”

“Sorry, shipmate!” said the traveler. But already he was scheming: “How’d you know there was an animal in there?”

“I’m blind—but not deaf.”

The whole room was tingling with a crystalline vibration. Suddenly it stopped. The traveler wiped great drops of sweat from his forehead.

“Shipmate,” he said, “that ain’t really an animal. I’m holding onto that. I don’t want to sell it to nobody. And if I don’t have any money tonight, it’s the jug for me. No more space voyages, no more loot, no more nothing. I’m an HZ, to be suspended.”

“I get it,” answered the quiet voice. “How much?”

The other almost choked. “Will you really give me—?”

“Not a thing, I don’t give anything for nothing, and I told you before I’m not interested in your cricket in a cage. But I can let you have five thousand credits, no more, on your shipping papers. In six days, when you come back to get them, you’ll pay me five hundred credits extra. That’s all.”

“You’re worse than a Yahoo!”

“No. I’m blind.” He added grimly, “My accident was caused by a jerk who hadn’t insured his rocket. I don’t like jerks.”

“But,” said the adventurer, shuffling his feet, “how can you check my papers?”

“My brother’s over there. Come on out, Jacky.”

A sharp little grin appeared in the shadows. Out between a lunar harmonium in a meteorite, and a dark Terrestrial cloth on which a flayed martyr had bled, came a cripple mounted on a little carriage—legless, with stumps of arms, propelling himself with the aid of two hooks: a malicious little old man of twelve.

“Mutant,” said the blind man curtly. “But he makes out, with his prosthetics. Papers in order, Jacky?”

“Sure, North. And dirtier than a dustrag.”

“That only means they’ve seen good use. Give him his five thousand credits.”

The blind man pressed a button. A cabinet opened, revealing a sort of dumb-waiter. In the top half there was a little built-in strong box; in the bottom crouched a Foramen chimera, the most bloodthirsty of beasts, half cat, half harpy.

The traveler jumped back.

The cripple rolled himself over to the strong box, grabbed up a bundle of credits and blew on the monster’s nose. It purred affectionately.

“You see, the money’s well guarded here,” said North.

“Can I leave my chest with you, anyhow?” asked the traveler humbly.

* * * *

So the chest remained. Using the dumb-waiter, the cripple sent it up to the small apartment that the two brothers shared in the penthouse of the building. According to its owner, the creature that was “not really an animal” was in hibernation; it had no need of food. The porous wood allowed enough air to pass. But the box had to be kept in a dark place. “It lives in the great deeps,” he had explained; “it can’t stand daylight.”

The building was really very old, with a lot of elevators and closets. The mutants and cripples of the last war, who lived there because it was cheap, accommodated themselves to it. North dragged the chest into the strong room next to his study.

That evening, the free movie in the building was showing an old stereo film, not even sensorial, about the conquest of the Pleiades, and Jacky announced that he wanted to see it. About to leave, he asked his brother, “You don’t suppose that animal will get cold in there?”

“What are you talking about? It’s in hibernation.”‘

“Anyhow,” said Jacky spitefully, “we’re not getting paid to keep it in fuel.”

The movie lasted till midnight, and when Jacky came back there was a full moon. The boy testified later that he had been a little overexcited. A white glimmer flooded the upper landing, and he saw that the French windows of the “garret,” as they called his brother’s study, were masked with a black cloth. Jacky supposed North had taken this extra precaution on account of the animal; he pushed himself forward with his hooks, and knocked on the door, but no one answered, and there was no key in the lock.

He told himself then that maybe North had gone down six stories to the bar in the building, and he decided to wait He sat on the landing; the night was mild, and he would not have traded the air at that height for any amount of conditioned and filtered atmosphere. The silver star floated overhead in the black sky. Jacky mused that “it means something after all, that shining going on just the same for x years, that moon that’s seen so many old kings, poets, and all those lovers’ stories. The cats that yowl at night must feel it; and the dogs too.” In the lower-class buildings, there were only robot dogs. Jacky longed for a real dog—after all, he was only twelve. But mutants couldn’t own living animals.

And then ...

(On the magnetic tape where Jacky’s deposition was taken down, it seemed that at that moment the boy began to choke. The recording was interrupted, and the next reel began: “Thanks for the coffee. It was good and bitter.”)

He had heard an indefinable sound, very faint . . . just the sound of the ocean in a seashell. It grew, and grew. ... At the same time (though he couldn’t say how), there were images. A nacreous sky, the color of pearl, and green crystal waves, with crests of sparkling silver. Jacky felt no surprise; he had just left the stereo theater. Perhaps someone in the building opposite had turned on a sensorial camera— and the vibrations, the waves, were impinging here by accident.

But the melody swelled, and the boy sank under the green waves. They stank of seaweed and fish. . . . Carried along by the currents, the little cripple felt light and free. Banks of rustling diatoms parted for him; a blue phosphorescence haloed the medusas and starfish, and pearly blue anemones formed a forest. Grazed by a transparent jellyfish, Jacky felt a nettle-like burning. The shadow of a hammerhead shark went by, and scattered a twinkling cloud of smelt. Farther down, the shadow grew denser, more opaque and mysterious—caverns gaped in a coral reef. The tentacle of an octopus lashed the water, and the cripple shuddered.

He found himself thrown back against the hull of a ship, half buried in the sand. A little black and gold siren, garlanded with barnacles, smiled under the prow; and he fell, transported, against a breach that spilled out a pirate treasure, coffers full of barbaric jewels. Heaps of bones were whitening at the bottom of the hold, and a skull smiled with empty sockets. This must be an amateur film, Jacky thought: a little too realistic. He freed himself, pushed away as hard as he could with his hooks, rose to the surface at last—and almost cried out.

The sky above him was not that of Earth. North had told him how that other dark ocean looked—the sub-ether. The stars were naked and dazzling. Reefs, that were burning meteors, sprang up out of the void. And the planets seemed to whirl near enough to touch—one was ruby, another orange, still another a tranquil blue; Saturn danced in its airy ring.

Jacky thrust his hooks out before him to push away those torches. In so doing, he slipped and rolled across the landing. The door opened a second later—he hadn’t had time to fall three steps, but this time he wasn’t diving alone: beside him, in the hideously reddened water, whirled and danced the body of a disjointed puppet, with gullied features in a face of wax.

Jacky raised his head. North stood on the sill, terrible, pale as a statue of old ivory; the black bandage cut his face in two. He called, “Who’s there? Answer me, or I’ll call the militia!”

His voice was loud and angry. North, who always spoke so softly to Jacky. . . .

“It’s me, Jack,” said the boy, trembling. “I was coming back, and I missed a step. ...”

(“I told a lie,” said Jacky later, to the militiamen who were questioning him. And he stared into their eyes with a look of open defiance. “That’s right, sure, I told a lie. Because I knew he’d kill me.”)

* * * *

The next morning there was no blood and no corpse on the landing. Only a smell of seaweed. . . .

Jacky was filling the coffee cups, in the back of the shop, while the television news broadcast was on. Toward the end, the announcer mentioned that the body of a drowned man had been taken from the harbor. The dead man’s face appeared on the tiny screen at the moment North came into the shop.

“Hey, look at that!” called the cripple. “Your five thousand credits are done for.”

“What’s that?” asked his brother, picking up his china cup and his buttered bread with delicate accuracy.

“The character with the pet, what’s his name? Oh, yes, Joash Du Guast—what a monicker! They’ve just fished him out of the channel. Guess what, they don’t know who he is: somebody swiped his wallet.”

“A dead loss,” said the older. “You’re certain he’s the one?”

“He’s still on the screen. He isn’t a pretty sight.”

An indefinable expression passed over North’s mobile features. “You’d think he was relieved,” Jacky told himself. Aloud, he asked, “What do we do with the animal?”

“Does it bother you?” asked North, a little too negligently.

“Me, old man,” said the cripple in a clownish tone, imitating a famous fat actor, “as long as there’s no wrinkles in my belly! Where did he come from, this Joash?”

“He talked about the Aselli,” said North, reaching with a magician’s deftness for another slice of bread. “And a lot of other things, too. What are you up to this morning? Got any work to do?”

“Not much! The Stimpson order to send out. A crate of lunar bells coming in. I ought to go to the Reeducation Center, too.”

“Okay, I see you’ve got a full morning. Can you bring me a copy of the weekly news disc?”

“Sure.”

But Jacky didn’t go to the Reeducation Center that morning, nor to his customers. With his carriage perched on the slidewalk, he rode to Astronautics Headquarters, a building among others, and had some difficulty getting upstairs in the elevator, amid the students’ jibes. Some of them asked, “You want to do the broad jump in a rocket?” And others, “‘He thinks these are the good old days, when everybody was hunting for round-bottoms to send to the Moon!” It was not really spiteful, and Jacky was used to it.

He felt a touch of nostalgia, not for himself but for North. He knew North would never come here again. The walls were covered with celestial charts; microfilm shelves rose from one floor to the next, and in all the glass cases there were models of spaceship engines, from the multi-stage rockets and sputniks, all the way up to the great ships that synthesized their own fissionables. Jacky arrived all out of breath in front of the robot card sorter, and handed it his card.

“The Aselli,” spat the robot. “Asellus Borealis? Asellus Australis? Gamma Cancri or Delta Cancri?”

“There’s nothing else out there?”

“Yes, Alphard, longitude twenty-six degrees nineteen minutes. Alpha Hydrae.”

“Hydra, that’s an aquatic monster? Is it a water planet? Read me the card.”

“There is little to tell,” crackled the robot. “The planet is almost unexplored, its surface being composed of oceans. No regular relations with Earth.”

“Fauna? Flora?”

“Without evidence to the contrary, those of oceans in general.”

“Intelligent life?”

The robot made a face with its ball bearings. “Without evidence to the contrary, none. Nor any human beings. Nothing but sea lions and manatees.”

“Manatees? What are they?” asked Jacky, suddenly apprehensive.

“Herbivorous sirenian mammals that live on Earth, along the shores of Africa and America. Manatees sometimes grow as long as three meters, and frequent the estuaries of rivers.”

“But—’sirenians’?”

“A genus of mammals, related to the cetaceans, and comprising the dugongs, manatees, and so on.”

Jacky’s eyebrows went up and he cried, “I thought it came from ‘siren’!”

“So it does,” said the robot laconically. “Fabulous monsters, half woman, half bird or fish. With their sweet singing, they lured voyagers onto the reefs. . . .”

“Where did this happen?”

“On Earth, where else?” said the robot, offended. “Between the isle of Capri and the coast of Italy. Young man, you don’t know quite what you mean to ask.”

But Jacky knew.

On his return, as he expected, he found the shop closed and a note tacked to the door: “The pilot is out.” Jacky hunted in his pockets for the key, slipped inside. All was calm and ordinary, except for that smell which ruled now like the mistress of the house, the smell that you breathe on the beaches, in little coves, in summer: seaweed, shells, fish, perhaps a little tar.

Jacky set the table, set to work in the kitchenette, and prepared a nice little snack, lobster salad and ravioli. Secretive and spiteful, imprisoned among the yellowing antiques of the shop, the young cripple really loved them all.

When everything was ready—fresh flowers in the vases, the ravioli hot, ice cubes in the glasses—Jacky rang three times, according to custom. No one answered. Everything was a pretext for a secret language between the two mutilated brothers, who adored each other. The first stroke of the bell meant: “The meal is ready, his lordship may come down”; the second: “I’m hungry”; and the third: “I’m hungry, hungry, hungry!” The fourth had almost the sense of “Have you had an accident?”

Jacky hesitated a moment, then pressed the button. The silence was deep among the crystallized plants and the gems of seven planets. Did this mean that North was really away? The cripple hoisted himself into the dumb-waiter and rode up to the penthouse.

On the upper landing, the scent had changed; it had flowered now into unknown spices, and it would have taken a more expert observer than Jacky to recognize the aromatics of the fabulous past: nard, aloes, and benzoin, the bitter thyme of Sheba’s Balkis, the myrrh and olibanum of Cleopatra.

In the midst of all this, the music was real, almost palpable, like a pillar of light, and Jacky asked himself how it could be that the others, on the floors below, didn’t hear it.

* * * *

North Ellis closed the door behind him, turned the key and shot the bolt. His blind man’s hands, strong and slender, executed these movements with machine-like precision, but he was panting a little, and in spite of old habit, had almost missed the landing. He was so hard pressed . . . but he had to foresee everything. Jacky must never enter this room. Jacky . . . Resting his back against the door, North thought for a moment that he should have sent Jacky to Europe. Their aunt, their mother’s sister, lived somewhere in a little village with a musical name. He felt responsible for Jacky.

He swept away these preoccupations like dead leaves, and walked toward the dark corner where the chest lay under a black cloth. His fingers crept over the porous wood, which scented his palms.

“You’re there,” he said in a cold, harsh voice. “You’ve been waiting for me, you!”

The being that crouched at the heart of the shadows did not immediately answer, but the concentric waves of the music swelled out. And the man who had tumbled to earth with broken wings, awaited neither by his mother, dead of leukemia, nor by a red-haired girl who had laughed, turning her primrose face beside a white neck . . . the blind pilot felt himself neither deprived nor unhappy.

“You’re beautiful, aren’t you? You’re very beautiful! Your voice ...”

“What else would you like to know?” responded the waves, growing stronger. “You are sightless, I faceless. I told you, yesterday when you opened the strong room: I am all that streams and sings. The glittering cascades, the torrents of ice that break on the columbines, the reflection of the multiple moons on the oceans. . . . And I am the ocean. Let yourself float on my wave. Come. . . .”

“You made me kill that man yesterday.”

“What is a man? I speak to you of tumbling abysses, dark and luminous by turns, of the crucibles where new life is forged, and you answer me with the death of a spaceman! Anyhow, he deserved it: he captured me, imprisoned me, and would have come back to separate us!”

“Separate us . . .” said North. “Do you think that’s possible?”

‘No—if you follow me.”

The central melody grew piercing. It was like a spire, or a bridge over a limitless space. And the unconscious part of the human soul darted out to encounter that harmony. The wheeling abyss opened, it was peopled with trembling nebulas, with diamonds and roses of fire. ...

North toppled into it.

... It was strange to recognize, in this nth dimension, the crowds of stars he had encountered in real voyages—the glacial scintillation of Polaris, the scattered pearls of Orion’s Belt. North marveled to find himself again in this night, weightless and free, without spacesuit or rocket. Jets of photons bore him on immense wings. The garret, the mutants’ building, the Earth? He could have laughed at them. The Boreal Dragon twisted its spirals in a spray of stars. He crossed in one bound an abyss streaming with fire—Berenice’s Hair—and cut himself on the blue sapphire of Vega in the Lyre. He was not climbing alone: the living music wound him in its rings.

“Do you think to know the Infinite?” said the voice enfolded in the harmonies. “Poor Earthlings, who claim to have discovered everything! Because you’ve built heavy machines that break all equilibrium, that burst into flame and fall, and martyr your vulnerable human flesh? ... Come, I’ll show you what we can see, we obscure and immobile ones, in the abysses, since what is on high is also down below. . . .”

The star spirals and the harmonies surged up. In the depths of his night, North gazed upon those things that the pilots, constrained by their limited periscopic screens, never saw: oceans of rubies, furnaces of emeralds, dark stars, constellations coiled like luminous dragons. Meteorites were a rain of motionless streaks. Novas came to meet him; they exploded and shattered in sidereal tornadoes, the giants and dwarfs fell again in incandescent cascades. Space-time was nothing but a flaming chalice.

“Higher! Faster!” sang the voice.

All that passed beyond the vertigo and tipsiness of the flesh. North felt himself tumbled, dissolved in the astral foam; he was nothing but an atom in the infinite. . . .

“Higher! Faster!”

Was it at that moment, among the dusty arcs, far down at the bottom of the abyss, at the heart of his being, that he felt that icy breath, that sensation of horror? It was more than unclean. It was as if he had leaped over the abysses and the centuries, passed beyond all human limits—and ended at this. At nothingness, the void. He was down at the bottom of a well, in utter darkness, and his mouth was full of blood. Rhythmic blows were shaking that closed universe. Trying to raise himself, he felt under his hands the porous, wrinkled wood. A childish voice was crying, “North! Oh, North! Don’t you hear me? Let me in, let me in!”

North came back to himself, numbed, weak as if he had bled to death. For a little, he thought himself in the wrecked starship, out in the Pleiades. He hoisted himself up on his elbows and crawled toward the door. He had strength enough left to draw the bolt, turn the key, and then he fainted on the sill.

“It was those trips, you know . . .” Jacky looked up at the Spatial Militiamen who were taking their turn opposite him. They were not hard-hearted; they had given him a sandwich and a big quilt. But how much could they understand? “I never knew when North started getting unhappy. Me, I never went on a trip farther away than the coast. Ever since he’s been blind, he always seemed to be so calm! I thought he was like me. When I was around him, I felt good, I never wanted to go anywhere. Sometimes, to try and be the same as him, I’d put a bandage around my eyes, and try to see everything in sounds instead of colors. Sure, the switchboard operator, and the night watchman (not the robot, the other one), they said this was no life for two boys. But North was blind and I was crippled. Who would have wanted us?”

The Chief of Militia reflected that Jacky was mistaken: someone would certainly have wanted North. But saying nothing of this, he went on asking questions.

. . . The next day was cloudy; North pulled an old space-suit out of a pile of scrap iron and began to polish the plates, whistling. He explained to Jacky that he was going to put it at the entrance of the shop. Toward noon, Jacky took a message; he was told that the board of directors of a certain famous sanatorium were reluctant to accept a boarder mutated to that extent. He accepted their excuses and hung up, silently. So that was what it was all about: North wanted to get rid of him. He was crazy—it was as if he had gone blind all over again! During a miserable lunch, the idea came to him to put the apartment’s telephone line out of commission: that way, the outer world would leave them alone. But first he wanted to call up Dr. Evers, their family doctor, and the telephone did not respond. Jacky realized that North had forestalled him.

After that, he made himself small, rolled his carriage behind some crates, and installed himself on a shelf of the bookcase. It was his favorite hiding place. There were still in the shop some volumes bound in blond leather, almost golden, which smelled of incense or cigars, with yellowing pages and the curious printing of the twentieth century. They had quaint pictures, not even animated. Without having to look for it, he stumbled upon the marvelous story of the navigator who sailed the wine-dark sea. The sail was purple, and the hull of sandalwood. Off the mythological coasts, a divine singing arose, inviting the sailors to more distant flights. The reefs were fringed with pearls; the white moon rose high above the fabulous mountains. Ulysses stopped up their ears with wax and tied himself to the mast. But he himself heard the songs of the sirens. . . .

“North,” the boy asked later, forgetting all caution, “is there such a thing as sirens?”

“What?” asked the blind man, with a start.

“I mean, the sailors in the olden days, they said—”

“Crud,” said North. “Those guys went out of their heads, sailing across the oceans. Just think, it took them longer between Crete, a little island, and Ithaca, than it takes us to get to Jupiter. They went short of food, and their ships were walnut shells. And on top of everything else, for months on end they’d see nobody except a few shipmates, as chapped and hairy as they were. Well, they’d start to go off their rockers, and the first woman pirate was Circe of Calypso to them, and the first cetacean they met was an ocean princess.”

“A manatee,” said Jacky.

“That’s right, a manatee. Have you ever seen one?”

“No.”

“Sure, that’s right, I don’t think there is one in the zoo. Maybe in the exotic specimens. Take down the fourth book from the left, on the ‘Nat. Sciences’ shelf. Page seven hundred ninety-two. Got it?”

The page was freshly dog-eared; North must have been leafing through the book, without being able to read it. Well, it was a big beast with a round head and mustaches, and a thick oily skin. The female was giving suck to a little tar-baby. They all had serious expressions. Jacky was overcome with mad laughter.

“Ridiculous, isn’t it?” North asked in an unrecognizable voice, harsh and broken. “To think so many guys have dived into the water on account of that! I think they must have been sick.”

But that evening, he offered Jacky a ticket to the planetarium and a trip to the amusement park. Jacky refused politely; he was content to stay on his shelf. Again he plunged into the volume bound in blond leather, discovering for the first time that life has always been mysterious and that destiny wears many masks. The isles with the fabulous names flickered past to the rhythm of strophes; the heroes sailed for the conquest of the Golden Fleece, or perhaps they led a pale well-beloved out of Hades. Some burned their wings in the sun and fell. . . .

North walked around cat-footed, closing the shutters, arranging the planetary knickknacks. He disappeared so quietly that Jacky was not aware of it, and it was only when the boy wanted to ask him for some information about sailing ships that his absence became a concrete fact. Suddenly afraid, Jacky slipped to the floor, and discovered that his carriage had also disappeared. He crawled then, with the aid of his hooks, among the scattered pieces of iron, and it was then that he stumbled over a horrible viscous thing: the wet billfold of Joash Du Guast. The five thousand credits were still inside.

After that, his fear had no limit, and Jacky crawled instinctively toward the door, which he found shut; then to the dumb-waiter, where he heard the Foramen chimera, caged, mew pleasantly. “It won’t work, old lady,” he breathed at it. “They’ve locked us both up together.”

He licked a little blood out of the corners of his mouth, and thought hard. He would have to be quick. To be sure, he could hammer on the door, but the street was deserted at night, the normals were all getting ready to watch their tele-sets, or some other kind of screen—and there was no use knocking on the walls: the shop was surrounded by empty cellars. And the telephone was dead.

Jacky then did what any imprisoned boy of his age would have done (but from him, it demanded a superhuman effort) : he clambered up the curtains, managed to open the window with his hook, and jumped out. He was hurt, falling on the pavement.

* * * *

. . . “That damn’ kid!” thought North as he opened the door of the garret. “Sirens!”

His hands were trembling. A wave of aromatics, already familiar, came into his night and surrounded him: he had breathed them on other worlds. He understood what was required of him, and he let himself go, abandoned himself to the furious maelstrom of sounds and smells, to the tide of singing and perfumes. His useless, mutilated body lay somewhere out of the way, on a shelf.

“Look at me,” said the music. “I am in you, and you are me. They tried in vain to keep you on Earth, with chains of falsehood. You are no longer of Earth, since we live one life together. Yesterday I showed you the abysses I know. Show me the stars you have visited: memory by memory, I shall take them. In that way, perhaps, shall we not find the world that calls us? Come. I shall choose a planet, like a pearl.”

He saw them again, all of them.

Alpha Spicae, in the constellation of the Virgin, is a frozen globe, whose atmosphere is so rich in water vapor that a rocket sticks in the ground like a needle of frost. Under a distant green sun, this world scintillates like a million-faceted diamond, and its ice cap spreads toward the equator. On the ground, you are snared in a net of rainbows and green snow, a snow that smells like benzoin (all the pilots know that stellar illusion). On Alpha Spicae, a lost explorer goes mad in a few hours.

North was irresistibly drawn away, and shortly recognized the magnetic planet of the Ditch in Cygnus. That one, too, he had learned to avoid on his voyages: it was followed in its orbit by the thousands of sidereal corpses it had captured. The bravest pilots followed it in their coffins of sparkling ice; for that sphere, no larger than the Moon, is composed of pure golden ore.

They passed like a waterspout across a lake of incandescent crystal—Altair. Another trap lay in wait for them in the constellation Orion, where the gigantic diamond of Betelgeuse flashed; a phantasmagoria of deceptive images, a spiderweb of lightnings. The orb which cowered behind these mirages had no name, only a nickname: Sundew. Space pilots avoided it like the Pit.

“Higher!” sang the voice, made up now of thousands of etheric currents, millions of astral vibrations. “Farther!”

But here, North began to struggle. He knew now where she was drawing him, and what incandescent hell he would meet on that path, because he had already experienced it. He knew of a peculiar planet with silvery-violet skies, out in the mysterious constellation of Cancer. It was the most beautiful he had ever glimpsed, the only one he had loved like a woman, because its oceans reminded him of a pair of eyes. Ten dancing moons crowned that Alpha Hydrae, which the ancient nomads called Al-Phard. It was a deep watery world, with frothing waves: an odor of sea-salt, of seaweed, of ambergris drifted over its surface. A perpetual ultrasonic music jumbled all attempts at communication, and repulsed the starships. The oxygen content of Alpha Hydrae’s atmosphere was so high that it intoxicated living beings and burned them up. The rockets that succeeded in escaping the attraction of Al-Phard carried back crews of the blissful dead.

It was in trying to escape its grip that an uncontrolled machine, with North aboard, had once headed toward the Pleiades and crashed on the surface of an asteroid.

Heavy blows shook the temples of the solitary navigator. The enormous sun of Pollux leaped out of space, exploded, fell to ruin in the darkness, with Procyon and the Goat; the whole Milky Way trembled and vibrated. The human soul lost in that torrent of energy, the soul that struggled, despaired, foundered, was only an infinitesimal atom, a sound —or the echo of a sound, in the harmony of the spheres.

* * * *

“This is it,” said Jacky, wiping his bloody mouth. “Honest, this is it, Inspector. There’s the window I jumped out of. . . .”

There it was, with its smashed glass, and Jacky did not mention how painful the fall had been. His forearms slashed, he had hung suspended by his hooks. On the pavement, he had lost consciousness. Coming to later, under a fine drizzle of rain, he had, he said, “crawled and crawled.” Few of the passing autos had even slowed down for that crushed human caterpillar. “Oh, Marilyn, did you see that funny little round-bottom?”—”It must be one of those mutant cripples, don’t stop. Galla. . . .”—”Space! Are they still contagious?” Jacky bit his lips. Finally, a truck had stopped. Robots—a crew of robots from the sanitation department-had picked him up. He began to cry, seeing himself already thrown onto the junk-heap. By chance, the driver was human; he heard, and took him to the militia post.

“I don’t hear anything,” said the inspector after a moment of silence.

“The others in the block didn’t hear anything either!” breathed Jacky.

“I think he must be very unhappy, or else drunk. . . . Are there ultrasonics, maybe? Look, the dogs are restless.”

Certainly, the handsome Great Danes of the Special Service were acting strangely: they were going around in circles and whining.

“A quarrel between monsters,” thought Inspector Morel. “Just my luck: a mutant stump of a kid, a space pilot with the D.T.’s, and a siren! They’ll laugh in my face down at headquarters!”

But, as Jacky cried and beat on the door, he gave the order to break it in. The boy crawled toward the dumbwaiter; one of the militiamen almost fired on the chimera, which had leaped from its cabinet, purring.

“That’s nothing, it’s only a big cat from Foramen!” Jacky wailed. “Come on, please come on, I’m going up the shaft.”

“I was never in such a madhouse before,” thought the inspector. There were things in every corner—robots or idols, with three heads or seven hands. There were talking shells. One of the men shouted, feeling a mobile creeper twine itself in his hair. They ought to forbid the import of these parlor tricks into an honest Terrestrial port. Not surprising that the lad upstairs should have gone off his nut, the inspector told himself.

When the militia reached the topmost landing of the building, Jacky was stretched out in front of the closed door, banging it desperately with his hooks. Whether on account of ultrasonics or not, the men were pale. The enormous harmony that filled the garret was here perceptible, palpable. Morel called, but no one answered.

“He’s dead?” asked Jacky. “Isn’t he?”

They sensed a living, evil presence inside.

Morel disposed his men in pairs, one on either side of the door. A ferret-faced little locksmith slipped up and began to work on the bolt. When he was finished, the militiamen were supposed to break the door down quickly and rush inside, while Morel covered them, if the need arose, with heat gun in hand. But it was black inside the garret; someone would have to carry a powerful flashlight and play it back and forth.

“Me,” said Jacky. He was white as a sheet, trembling all over. “If my brother’s dead, Inspector, you should let me go in. Anyhow, what risk would I take? You’ll be right behind me. And I promise not to let go of the flashlight, no matter what.”

The inspector looked at the legless child. “You might get yourself shot,” he said. “You never know what weapons these extra-terrestrials are going to use. Or what they’re thinking, or what they want. That thing . . . maybe it sings the way we breathe.”

“I know,” said Jacky. He neglected to add, “That’s why I asked to carry the flashlight. So as to get to it first.”

The inspector handed him the flashlight. He seized it firmly with one of his hooks. And the first sharp ray, like a sword, cut through the keyhole into the attic.

They all felt the crushing tension let go. Released, with frothing tongues, the dogs lay down on the floor. It was as if a tight cord had suddenly snapped. And abruptly, behind the closed door, something broke with a stunning crash.

At the same instant, the landing was flooded with an intolerable smell of burned flesh. Down in the street, ant-like pedestrians screamed and ran. The building was burning. An object falling in flames had burned itself in the roof. . . . Fire trucks were called.

The militiamen broke down the door, and Morel stumbled over a horrible mass of flesh, calcined, crushed, which no longer bore any resemblance to North. A man who had fallen from a starship, across the stellar void, might have looked like that. A man who had leaped into a vacuum without a spacesuit ... a half-disintegrated manikin. North Ellis, the blind pilot, had suffered his last shipwreck.

Overcome by nausea, the militiamen backed away. Jacky himself had not moved from the landing. He clung to the flashlight, and the powerful beam of light untiringly searched, swept the dark cave. The symphony that only his ears had heard grew fainter, then lost itself in a tempest of discordant sounds. The invisible being gave one last sharp wail (in the street, all the windows broke and all the lights went out).

Then there was silence.

Jacky sat and licked his bloody lips. Inside, in the garret, the militiamen were pulling down the black draperies, breaking furniture. One of them shouted, “There’s nothing here!”

Jacky dropped the flashlight, raised himself on his stumps. “Look in the chest! In the strong room, to the side—”

“Nothing in here. Nothing in the chest.”

“Wait a minute,” said the youngest of the militiamen, “there it is—on the floor.”

Then they dragged her out, her round head bobbed, and Jacky recognized the thick, glossy skin and the flippers. She had died, probably, at the first touch of the light, but her corpse was still pulsing in a dull rhythm. An ultrasonic machine? No. Two red slits wept bloody tears. . . . The sirens of Alpha Hydrae cannot bear the light.