Chapter IV

Cragin had little idea of how long they had flown, and none of the number of continua through which they had warped. They had been allowed to sleep, and upon awakening, had received food. That they were under guard was only to be sensed.

"They can afford to take us for granted," he muttered. He felt for the butts of his guns; they were still at his hips.

"Don't--" the girl said.

"Don't give it a second thought. I know when I've had it, and they know I do."

"You're convinced, then."

Cragin looked about the confines of the small metal cubicle in which they had been quartered as though trying to see through its walls for another glimpse of one of the flagship's crew. The servants of grade three were as unlike men as their cloaked captor had been similar. But not less incredible than other creatures he had seen. Only--intelligent. That, if nothing more. Cragin mused with a grimace.

"I could use a different word, kid, but it would come to the same thing. If IQ meant the social register around here, even the snottiest ancestors either of us ever had would look like only moderately successful bums. They got us where the gray matter's short. Of that I am convinced."

"They didn't have to fight very hard. Or should I be thanking you for my life?"

"Up to you. I'm just stalling for what we can get out of it. Who wants to die? Oh, I forgot--"

She turned away from him, and he fiddled with the controls of a small built-in telescreen. It was simple enough and he got it working easily, but it showed nothing. Just blackness. He left it on.

"You're thoroughly convinced of everything he told us, aren't you?" she asked at last.

"From a purely logical standpoint, what else--"

"Purely logical! For a little while I thought there was a chance that--that you weren't like all the rest."

"All what rest? I don't get your range, kid," Cragin answered.

"First you thought they were fakes--"

"At first that was logical, too. But old cloak-and-ray-gun there proved pretty damn conclusively that the crowd he works for are the bosses, the big bosses. That's what gets me."

"And it's the real reason, isn't it, that you wanted to call them fakes? Couldn't bear the idea of the precious culture of Earth taking a back seat to anything."

"That sounds good, coming from one of our top-notch scientists. The daughter and pupil of Fowler Griffin. One of our most respected...."

"Did you think we weren't human? Are scientists something to be worshipped?"

Cragin looked at her for a long, steady moment. He was mixed up again, and she was doing it.

"Without our science, Miss Griffin, we'd've all died five hundred years ago. Maybe that's why it takes top rating back home. What our men of science say we can do, we do--what they say we can't, we know we can't. It's that simple, only I don't see why I'm telling you this. For five centuries men have known from the day they could talk what their lives would be from that day to their deaths, and from one end of the universe their forbears had mastered to the other. It's all mapped out. It has to be, because the scientists tell us--they draw the maps. We follow them."

The girl was silent then for a long time, and Cragin fell to wondering exactly what she was getting at. Or maybe--maybe it was just the strain, or the shock of realizing that there were scientists who were of greater stature than Earth's, and it was they who truly ruled.

But the girl still had him mixed up.

There was a sudden gasp from her and he turned his head. The blackness in the telescreen had suddenly become punctured with white-hot, burning dots of light. Dots of light, perfectly aligned, in long, straight rows--a gateway! A gateway of stars, forged by the hands of those who owned all Space and Time, put into position to notify the entire cosmos that here for all who might seek it was the entrance to the home of the Owners!

For a moment Cragin could say nothing. He had seen their cloaked captor give a demonstration of raw power. And here was its counterpart at the other end of the ultimate in mastery--unvarnished, positive control.

They owned a universe, and were its architects as well.

"Ten million miles wide!" the girl breathed.

"A light-year long if it's a foot," Cragin said in a low voice. "And at the end--"

* * * * *

They watched as the pattern shifted; the dots grew larger until they were coruscating balls of white flame. And then, with a majestic slowness, the entrance to the gateway became a static, unchanging picture of unprecedented geometric symmetry.

"It's--we've stopped," the girl said.

"Cut our gun, that's all. Probably waiting for clearance to enter. The whole damn fleet of us."

"It's--it's pompous ridiculousness!" Her voice was edged with frustrated anger and it mounted as she spoke. "A gateway, a show-piece--a stupid affectation of the ultimate in egocentricity! With or without their little pathway, there's all of Space from which to make an approach--"

"I doubt it, princess. Outside this little welcome-mat I'll bet my pilot's papers there's a destructive field of some kind that'd blast the dye out of your hair at ten light-years. One gets you a thousand that this is the only way you get to see the top brass. And you don't do that without an O.K. from a big somebody."

The minute hand on Cragin's wristchron made seven complete circuits before the gateway again began expanding to receive them on the telescreen.

And then they were past its opening, and hurtling headlong down its great length at what Cragin knew must be a speed which, although no longer requiring flight by comptometer, would have taxed his skill to the utmost.

He and the girl watched the telescreen in silence for minutes, watching the pin-points of light on either side grow from minute flecks in the blackness to great spheres of flame within so many seconds, and then pass....

"Look!"

"Yeah, it's a great show. But--hell! It couldn't be a--"

The scintillating point of light which lie dead ahead, in the exact center of the gateway and at its extreme end, could not, Cragin realized, be a planet. Unless it were a perfectly polished reflector, it could not show so much like the miniature stars at either side.

It was a star, itself.

"It must be just illusion," he said evenly. "It's got to be."

"Oh no," Lin Griffin said. "Of course they live in the center of a star! They rule all, don't they? They're the great masters of all creation, aren't they? Certainly you don't think your great masters would live on anything so simple as a mere planet! But of course they live where the temperature is only several billion degrees--"

She began laughing and Cragin slapped her across the face.

"Cut it, kid, CUT IT!"

There were tears coming from her eyes and her face remained in the twisted contortions of hysteria even after her voice had become soundless.

She pulled away, and Cragin left her to herself. In a little while she began to cry and he could hear her sobbing above the even hum of the telescreen, but he left her alone.

And he knew one thing. It _had_ to be illusion. Damn it, Owners or not, no matter what the hell they were, it had to be illusion!

Cragin had never felt shaken through to the inside of him before. Fear and awe had been banished from the minds of men for five centuries. Yet he felt as though he were staggering blindly, and he knew he was helpless.

The pin-point had become a searing, blinding thing, and even as he shielded his eyes, it filled the screen. They were going into it.

Into it.

Into a live star.

No, was the only word he could think. No.

NO!

He spun away, wrenching the telescreen off as he did so.

But nothing changed, and he did not die. Somehow, there was no change at all.

He sat upright, rigid, as though self-hypnotized for what could have been hours or minutes. And there was no change, no awful, searing wave of white heat, no last instant of torture before death.

Simply, suddenly, a light jar.

And Cragin wondered sardonically if his small rectangular bit of enamelite would be at all impressive on the planet the Owners called home.

* * * * *

Neither Cragin nor the girl ever saw the planet as such. And it was a planet, Cragin learned, a planet little larger than Earth, honeycombed with subterranean tubes and chambers as had been the control point; a labyrinth which contained a civilization of little more than twenty million members; a headquarters for those who ran and owned the universe.

They were escorted to the testing place by two creatures of the fourth grade; bipeds, shorter than men, with hunched backs and splayed tentacles for arms and hands. Cragin noted that they carried armament of a sort; simple tube-like objects which were aimed at him while he was relieved of his Krells.

Then he and Lin Griffin were placed in a bullet-shaped vehicle, one of the guards operating its controls and the other stationing himself behind them.

Cragin was not prepared for the girl's sudden outburst and jerked his hands vainly at the empty holsters at his hips.

"Of course we can escape from these simpletons!" she cried. "We can easily overpower these dimwitted brutes--"

There was no reaction from their guards; Cragin's hands relaxed slowly.

"What--"

"Don't you understand? They're fourth grade--two less than our cloaked friend. They are our guards, so of course our superiors in intelligence, but still not on a high enough plane to interpret the emanations of pure thought as he was."

"You'll do, I guess. But I've still got a feeling that if either of us twitches an eyebrow--"

She continued as though he had not spoken. "He took your guns; we're now held prisoner under weapons. They have to rely on material means of power. Look, Cragin!"

Highly-polished curved metal walls of an alloy comprised of ores that he could not begin to identify flashed past at such speed that all sensation of motion was negated. There was no sound.

"I'm looking."

"It's a safe bet the tests will be something devised by the Owners themselves. Something that will measure our total thought potential--something based on an extremely advanced function of psychometrics."

"You're over my head again."

"If we're acceptable, Cragin, we're established in one grade or another--and will be constantly under the supervision of creatures of the next highest grade--that's the way it's been working so far, with the exception of the little excursion we're taking now."

"In other words--"

"In other words, we've got to think in the simplest patterns possible. Childish things. Anything that will belie our true intelligence level. What's your I.Q.?"

"I didn't ask you how old you were, duchess, but I test out at an embarrassed 158 or so."

"We match within ten points. It'll have to do. Because we've got to fake--test out at about 115."

"Like I say, you'll do. Testing out at 115, our bosses on the next level shouldn't be a shred above 130 or so. So--"

"So we've got them by almost a 30-point margin. We'll be in a position to out-think our immediate guards, and perhaps even those over them. It's our only hope."

"Mental imposters.... You just forgot one little item, honey."

"Oh of course. They're the masters of all, so there's no possibility that a mere human--"

"Take it easy. I didn't say it's no go. Just wondering if 115's are acceptable. If not, you know what happens. We go to the bottom of the class never to rise again. Maybe even 160's aren't eligible. Remember, the control points are hidden relative to the mental ability of the civilizations whose planets they control. Only people who exceed the Owners' estimate--"

"If they control our system, they control billions of others--we were told that. Some higher, some certainly lower. And we did discover the point."

"You and your father. I never would have."

"Look, Cragin. It's the only chance there is. But if I fake and you don't--"

"Yeah. You think it'll work?"

"I don't know."

"But you'd rather die, that it, than be a knowing slave to another civilization, even though it is undisputed master of--"

"That's why I'd rather die, Cragin! Because they're false masters!"

He didn't reply. She was confusing him again, and perhaps the basic reason for the confusion was that he didn't understand why she mixed him up. If there was anything Earth's culture stood for, it was the integrity of the fact--maturation and development of the individual through strict adherence to the known. Only the proven fact was worthy of belief and acceptable as a basis for thought. Nothing else.

But the girl wasn't behaving that way.

"All right. We gamble that an IQ of 115 is acceptable. Then we gamble that we can effect a break. In other words we just take a chance on a chance; make a really long shot out of it."

"Will you, Cragin?"

He laughed a little. Hell, sooner or later, anyway--

"Hand me my rattle," he said. "I better practice. The asteroids are falling down, falling down; the asteroids are falling down, my fair lady...."