Chapter VI

It had been, as closely as he could tell, nine years.

Nine years of aimless--no, helpless, wandering from planet to planet, from sun to sun, flying tight-rope between countless dimensions, following his fantastic escape from the realm of the Owners. He should feel excitement now; should want to laugh until he deafened himself because even now, swimming palely in the field of his forward electronoscope was the solar system, his system; HOME.

Luck, chance, whatever you wanted to call it, he was home. Stumbled on it, of course, as he had stumbled his entire way the length, depth and time of all creation. He should laugh, but there was no strength for laughter. There was just a tranquil kind of acceptance, a mould of thought into which Cragin had long since forced his mind, in order to retain his sanity as he ran the never ending gamut of change which was the very fabric of the infinity in which he had plodded.

Home.

A place of torture and of slow death, but at least a place where he might die among his own kind.

Had he not been barely minutes through the Barrier with the comptometers still warm, the insistent radar signal wouldn't have been worth its interruption of his thoughts.

But anything so close to the Barrier demanded at least cursory investigation. He flicked a radar panel relay to TRACK.

The object's speed was building up. It was without a doubt a controlled acceleration. No school kid could fail to recognize a comptometer-regulated trajectory. Within seconds his fingers were flicking across a three dimensional plot-check.

_Headed for a Barrier-bust!_

Cragin checked the comps back in, mentally replotting a new trajectory of his own for them to pick up as he did so. As his hurtling craft entered a sliding, almost too-closely cut parabolic reversement, he cut in his com-beam.

"This is Cragin, Stellar Patrol, please ack, whoever you are. You are heading for the Barrier. You must alter course. You have not more than three minutes. Acknowledge please if you read me."

He waited, wondering. There was no answer, just the emptiness of the void echoing hollowly to the eternal half-whisper of Infinity.

But--the track altered! The ship was slowing, curving off! Forty seconds went by, and it had gone into an oblique drift.

For the first time in nine years there was a sweaty feeling in the palms of his hands, in the stubble of his upper lip. He cut his comps out, hauled his ship into a paralleling trajectory, then angled a gradual interception path.

"This is Cragin," he repeated. His voice felt husky as though he had not used it for a century. "I am friendly. I intend no trouble. It is for your safety that I request permission to board you. Have information essential to your flight...."

There was no ack. He had his space-helmet dogged tight as he slid alongside the slender, dark-hued craft whose jets had been choked to the lazy, red-hued combustion of idling speed, and reached for his Krells. He hesitated, let them remain hanging on the bulkhead. He had said he was coming as a friend.

He flicked a single A-intensity magnetic tractor to the craft that seemed to float motionlessly beside his own, scrambled along it on his spacesuit's mag-unit, and was still perhaps five feet from the smooth side of the silent ship when an airlock growled open to receive him.

Once shut behind him, he tried to trace a million half-finished thoughts as the lock chamber cycled up to pressure.

Who was in here? Scientists who had long since learned the secret of the Barrier? Hardly, or his warning would have gone unheeded save for a polite acknowledgement. Who then--another explorer as Fowler Griffin had been? Or someone else who had stumbled onto the presence of the X Ecliptic and the machine-planet?

Or some alien flightmaster of some foreign universe who was either exploring or lost, as he had been lost....

A blue light flashed the intergalactic symbol for PRESSURE and the inner lock slid back.

* * * * *

The small control room was illuminated only with the soft wash of light emanating from the compact but complete instrument panel--an instrument panel at once strikingly similar to that of his own ship. A figure turned to meet him--

There were 40 years etched into a countenance that should have borne barely the hint of nine. The sag of the narrow shoulders told of the soul-breaking exhaustion that reflected dully from the sunken eyes more eloquently than the straight, bloodless mouth could ever have told. The gray lips were almost motionless as they parted.

"Hello, Cragin," Lin Griffin said.

"Greetings. My name is Randolph Cragin, Stellar Patrol. Your cooperation is appreciated, and was requested inasmuch as it is my duty to--to...."

The light was so uncertain, yet--there was something about the face. The forehead--deep within the eyes--

"Yes. Patrolman?"

"No," was all he could find to say. "No." He watched in an agonized disbelief as the suggestion of a smile mingled with the shadowed wrinkles of her ashen face.

"Even as yourself, Cragin, I--eluded them. It took this long, for a woman lacks the ready brute strength which so often turns impending defeat into quick victory. I am glad that you were successful, that you're alive. It was worth heeding your call to see you again."

"But I--I thought they. That is after I escaped they--their anger could have taken only one direction."

"It was not anger, precisely. Just--shall we say, a rather intensive increase in police efficiency? No, it was not anger. Mine was the anger. But now--" She hesitated, turned her eyes toward the instrument banks, then back to his. "Now I've got the high cards, Patrolman." There was a subtle change deep within the sunken eyes, as though a smoldering candle flame had suddenly become a tiny bit of polished steel glinting in the rays of a new sun at noon. "But this time, don't follow."

"I don't get it. Somehow you're still alive. But somehow--well, you--"

"Aged? Gotten old? Don't be afraid to say it. The vibrokey did most of it. Residuary effect. It has potentialities that I'm sure even father never dreamed of."

"Vibrokey? I don't--"

"Think back. Remember how I located the entrance to the machine planet, how I opened it? How I told you that father had said that it could shake whole buildings down? How I explained that it experiments with all possible combinations and magnitudes of vibration speeds and patterns until any assigned pattern is matched--"

Cragin scowled a little. Something stirred stealthily in his memory, and then the whole thing crept slowly back, piece by piece.

"You mean you slammed your way out with that gadget?"

"In a way. The one my father made was of course taken from me and destroyed. But I had helped him build it; I knew I could build another. But I had to steal what bits and pieces of materials I needed whenever it was possible. Sometimes I waited months for an opportunity, only to lose it at the last moment. Yet the waiting helped in its own way. Even as I slaved for them, Cragin, I thought. I figured, refigured. And when, after seven years, I had accumulated the few simple parts I needed, I knew I could build a better instrument than Fowler Griffin himself had."

"And you built it--"

"While the others slept and the guards ate. That took almost two years."

"Then?"

"I vibrated a guard into senility. He died of old age within seconds. In what simple uniform he wore and with his weapon, I bluffed my way aboard this ship in which we stand now. I had to kill a pilot and three crewmen before I was successful in tuning the key to a dimension existing in a completely different pattern of atomic vibrations. The transferal itself was instantaneous. Then on critical speeds I found my way back."

Cragin took a deep breath. "And you once told me I was impossible. But just the same I don't want to be kidded, even if you have got more circuits upstairs than I can ever be wired for. Remember I didn't pick you up going _toward_ home. The nose of this barrel was about to do a little Barrier-busting."

The faded smile returned to Lin Griffin's age-contorted face. She had not been completely immune to the device of her own making; even her brilliance had been unable to devise a vibration scheme which would resolve to zero the reaction effects of dimension transferal through alteration of atomic vibration patterns.

"I wanted to see Earth again, Cragin. I don't know if you understand that or not. Love is a common word, but few understand it.

"Our people, advanced in scientific knowledge and wisdom as they are, had long since forgotten it when we first met. It was seldom in their past that their faith was placed wholeheartedly in it. But they're my people just as they're yours, Cragin, and I love them because they are. And that's why I'm on my way to take over the machine-planet; to destroy it. To destroy it so that it can never be replaced."

"You aren't making sense, gal."

"I am, Cragin. Because Owners or no Owners, the Earth--the entire system and the universe in which it lives--have true physical and chemical values of their own--values determined in the very beginning by an entity far higher than they!"

"You mean you actually believe--"

"I do and I'm proud of it!"

Cragin felt his face grow warm, knew he reddened, was not sure why. He felt a strange compulsion to turn his eyes from hers. Mad? Easily said, of course, but--No.

No. Not mad at all.

"I may understand more than you think, Lin Griffin. I am human."

There was a moment's silence. Then, as though she had not heard him, she spoke rapidly.

"Once returned to the X Ecliptic, Cragin, I shall set the vibrokey adrift within its circumference, to set up a vibration field which will negate any form of other energy, including counter-vibrations, and which will mean complete destruction to any form of matter. I intend to activate the key from the machine-planet itself with nothing more complex than a simple radar beam, after I have restored the solar system to its original values."

"That'll mean everything within the Ecliptic will be destroyed; the machine-planet; you too. You're telling me you don't mean to come back. I can't let--"

It was as though she was totally deaf to each word he said.

"I don't believe in the Owners as masters of all, Patrolman, despite their extreme advances in the realm of both pure and applied science. You do. You do, because they symbolize the scientific ultimate.... But science was only ever meant to be a useful tool for men. Not their God."

Cragin felt funny inside.

"You'll die," he said like a child.

"But you shall not. You shall live. Such a thing," she said, "has been done before for the peoples of Earth.

"Now go, Cragin."

There was nothing else to do.

He paused. His wide shoulders sagged a little; he was not given to long talk, and he had discerned the signs of restlessness among a few of the impassive assemblage. Others were more kind. Little else, perhaps, could have been expected.

"As I confessed when I began," his quiet voice resumed, "I do not have many of the scientific answers you want. Hints that Lin Griffin gave me before her last trip beyond the Barrier--they are all I have to explain why the solar system is as you see it now; altered, changed, alive.

"Unless, gentlemen, you would accept a better answer; one that Lin Griffin herself might have given you. She would tell you that there is more to the Universe--the macrocosmo and the microcosmo as well--than Man has yet measured. To speak of Universe means, gentlemen, to speak not only of its known contents, but of its unknown as well, for it is eternally the container of both.

"Logically, I should have met death in my attempt at escape. Logically, no human woman could have endured what Lin Griffin endured, nor conceived the strategy with which the machine-planet was erased from existence. According to the logic of the last five centuries of human culture, what Lin Griffin did, how she thought, were both impossibilities.

"Yet Earth is green again.

"So when next you seek to plumb the Universe, gentlemen, and to equate yet one more of its myriad unknown quantities, think again of the half-gods, such as the Owners--such as we ourselves strove so mightily to be--who would equate them all. For it is always inevitable, gentlemen that soon or late, though the Universe remains, the half-gods go.

"There are some, I believe, who would seek too high an office. You--you may thank God, gentlemen, for the few who will not let them."

Then Cragin's voice at last fell silent, and silently, he stepped from the podium.

The time was five o'clock, Sunday, June 9, 3024, and from somewhere far off there was the gentle sound of a tolling bell.