Chapter II

There had been no sensation at all as Jerry stepped through the flat sheet of grayness in the doorway; no more physical awareness than a blind man might feel when passing through the beam of a powerful light. Perhaps there was a slight sensation of the mere presence of the energies that kept the opacity in existence--but that sensation, Jerry knew, was psychological, not actual.

"Although," he realized, as his world became an infinity of opalescent gray, "in this place, a psychological awareness will be no different from a genuine physical sensation. Better be careful what I think about in this psychokinetic fog...."

The thought was barely formulated when the grayness changed. It became moist against his flesh, and started swirling in tendrils about him. "Damn it, be _careful_!" he belatedly cautioned his mind. "Now the stuff _is_ fog!" Ahead of him in the swirling mist a brighter-than-gray glow led his footsteps forward.

He found himself standing beneath an overhanging marquee. Its black undersurface was runneled with condensed moisture amid the garish naked bulbs that haloed the wet cement sidewalk.

A red-coated doorman, resplendent behind rows of bright brassy buttons, gave him a smile as he pulled open the door that led to the club. Jerry nodded and went inside.

Thick crimson carpet cushioned his footfalls as he moved cautiously through an empty lobby, then down a white marble staircase toward the ballroom. Dimly, he was aware that the band at the far end of the mammoth room was playing music. What song he didn't know until a chance chording reminded him of a popular song of the day ... at which point that suddenly was the tune. The tables ringing the dance floor were covered with bright linen and shining silver. The tables were empty of patrons, however, until Jerry casually thought, "I should think business would be better--"

Suddenly a horde of laughing couples appeared in the chairs, with hurrying waiters bringing champagne, trays and menus to their guests.

The men wore tuxedos; the women were in evening dress. He looked suddenly at himself, and saw that his uniform was now the official dress uniform of the Space Corps. Before he could conquer it, his mind voiced a quick wish that he shouldn't be dining alone; and then a girl was rising from her place at a table beside the dance floor, hurrying to greet him, hands outstretched.

Her fingers were small and strong and warm. She smiled up at him. "Jerry, darling."

* * * * *

Despite her being only arm's length from him, he could not see her well at all. His impression was merely one of youth, loveliness and girl-ness. But then, as he tried to ascertain precisely what she looked like, hidden corners of his mind began to supply each detail an instant before his conscious quest for it and Jerry, in a few moments, was suddenly staggered with delighted shock.

Very few men are privileged to find a girl who lives up to all their dreams of perfection in a woman.

Hair as soft as cobweb, as fluffy as dancing clouds, as golden as flowing honey, cascaded down about a slender alabaster throat, and died in golden ripples on smooth white shoulders. Eyes the rich brown of raw chocolate gazed serenely at him from under red-gold brows and jet lashes, their patrician serenity permeated with a touch of twinkling impishness. Her lips were soft and not unlike berry-stained velvet, sweet and warm and tempting; her mouth generous and tilted at the corners into a smile of greeting--obviously the result of her subduing a frank laugh of joy at seeing him. Geometrically perfect teeth flashed white as porcelain between her lips. Her gown was a shimmering midnight blue, highlighted with random sprinkles of brightly coruscating gems.

Even as his lips parted to ask her name, Jerry knew it and spoke it softly. "Carol."

"Listen," she said softly, tilting her head toward where the band had begun a new song. Swift, urgent and rapturous, it floated through the room, surrounded the two of them, took possession of them. Then Carol was in his arms, and Jerry was dancing out onto the floor with her. The other couples were a blur of forgotten figures that swayed.

Jerry knew the melody. It was their song, their own private love song, the one that had been playing on the night when they both knew, suddenly, that there could be no one else for either of them but the other....

As they returned to their table, Jerry realized that Carol was now garbed in a white peasant blouse and bright flowered flaring skirt, and that her hair was drawn back at the temples to expose her ears, now adorned with golden hoops. The table was in a lattice-backed booth, covered with a red-and-white checkered cloth. The inner surface of the table held salt, pepper, grated cheese and breadsticks, matching cruets of pale olive oil and dark vinegar. The band was now a five-man gypsy ensemble.

* * * * *

"Remember the first time we came here, Jerry?" asked Carol, her eyes at once upon his face and distant, dreamy....

As she smiled, Jerry noticed with dull horror that one of her eyes was perceptibly lower than the other.

The teeth she flashed his way were mottled with brown stains. She took hold of his fingers with her own.

"Carol!" he said shakily, staring at the knuckly, red-raw hands that clutched at his. "What's happening?"

"Happening?" she said, her voice a raucous croak of amusement. "_Nothing's_ happening! In fact, you're probably one of the dullest guys I ever got stuck with." She tossed her head petulantly. Coarse, straw-colored hair flipped away from her thick neck. Her breath was sour with wine and miasmic with garlic.

"Carol!" he cried.

"Don't whine!" she snapped, viciously. "I hate a guy who whines!" With that, she shoved out of the booth, and waddled toward the rear of the coffeehouse, one hand scratching at a bulge of flesh that overhung the too-tight girdle. Her black leotards were twisted and dull as she passed the flashing rainbow lights of the brassy jukebox.

Jerry shoved away from the table, overturning his coffee in its cracked china cup, and he wove his way through the reek and smoke toward the door through which she'd vanished.

When he got there, the door was a peeling poster on a bare brick wall, advertising some long-forgotten show. His fingers scrabbled on rough mortar for a moment. Then he turned and paced back to his cot, where he flopped on his back in the long shadows of the bars.

"Norcriss!" said the guard, coming into the cell. "This is it!" The brass uniform buttons flashed brightly.

Strong hands were lifting him from the cot, dragging him down a long corridor toward a steel door. As they got there, the door opened wide, and Jerry saw the gaping maw of hungry steel gears, while behind him a man's voice droned prayers.

Then, before the guard could shove Jerry forward into that waiting mechanical mouth, Jerry noticed the odd shimmer of grayness that lay between himself and the waiting teeth, and he remembered that he was in a world of illusion.

At precisely that moment he knew beyond a doubt that those waiting jaws were illusion in form only. An atomic duplicator does not have to chew its intake. It merely dissolves the atomic bonds with the rays that flash between its power plates on either side of the disruption platform. The waiting mouth and teeth were mere symbols in Jerry's mind of what was about to occur.

They were unreal--but they could be fatal.

* * * * *

He shut his eyes, shoved backward with his feet, and thought of Carol as he'd first glimpsed her.

When he opened his eyes once more, she was standing before him in her ballroom gown again, and the band was just beginning to play their song once more.

"Jerry," she said, taking his arm. "Dance with me."

"No. We're in danger here. Come on, I'll get your coat. We've got to go away quickly."

A spark of alarm showed briefly in her eyes. Then she nodded wordlessly and hurried up the marble staircase with him to the lobby. Jerry got her coat from the check-room--a marvelous silvery fur that covered her from neck to waist--and then they were heading out into the fog together.

"Good evening to you, sir," said the doorman, eyes and buttons bright.

Jerry grunted and led Carol off down the street into the fog.

"Where are we going?" she asked, breathlessly trying to keep pace.

"Away, I hope," he said. Even their movement from the ballroom could be sheer illusion. Jerry tried moving from the club entrance in the exact reverse of the motion in which he'd first approached it, trying to achieve the real doorway that led from the experimental room into the antiseptic hospital corridor where Burgess waited. But the fog continued to be fog. It would not take on the form of that intangible gray shimmering that guarded the entrance to Anthony Mawson's megalomaniac universe.

"If I could only see where--" he began.

Then every tendril of fog was gone.

Before him lay the cold blackness of outer space, pinpointed with hard, unwinking stars. Jerry recoiled from the viewplate, shaken, and turned around to see Carol. Her eyes were wide and startled as she glanced about at the metal confines of the control cabin. Jerry had just time enough to think how incongruous she looked in her fur jacket and long blueblack gown ... and then she was clothed in the neat gray uniform of the WASP, trim short-sleeved shirt and sharply creased shorts.

"Jerry," said Carol. She slipped her arm through his, staring at the infinite stars in the viewplate. "What are we running from?"

He tried to think, but could not remember. "There's--some danger behind us. We have to get away from it, Carol. It means complete destruction if we're caught."

Carol stared helplessly at the stars in the viewplate. "But where are we running to?"

* * * * *

Jerry shook his head. "Impossible to tell. Not without the help of a good astrogator. Out in space, stars shift and magnitudes change. I'm not even qualified to guess--"

"Sire," said the astrogator, handing a clipboard to Jerry, "we can reach any of these seven stars in a few hours. Just tell me where you'd prefer to go."

Jerry turned to the man, resplendent in his neat Space Corps uniform, jacket bright with brass buttons. When he tried to focus upon the man's features he could detect nothing.

"We'd better choose the quickest trip," Jerry said, after a moment's indecision. "No telling how much fuel we have left."

The astrogator nodded. "I'm afraid that's out of my department, all right, sir. But if _you'd_ care to check the tanks?" Without waiting for a reply, the man turned and began to pick his way carefully toward the rear of the spaceship, stepping from girder to girder. The floor, Jerry noticed idly as he followed, was exposed to open space between the curving ribs of steel that formed the framework of the ship.

"Careful, now," he said, helping Carol along from one to the other. "That's vacuum out there. We don't want to fall through."

Ahead of Jerry, the implacable man with the brass buttons was nearly to the steel door masking the blast chamber where the components of fuel were mingled and ignited. Jerry, giddly aware of every hazardous step over the squares of star-speckled blackness, kept one hand on Carol's arm, the other on her chessboard.

"Don't spill any of the men!" she cautioned, as the diminutive plastic figures danced and rattled on the board. "I don't intend to search the whole cosmos for a pawn."

"Here you go, sir," said the politely insistent astrogator, opening the steel door. Before Jerry yawned an oval of intense white flame, the radiating heat crisping against his skin and hair.

"The fission rate," Jerry mumbled, consulting his wristwatch. "I've got to time it, or I won't be able to calculate the amount of fuel still in the bulkheads."

"Count it by steps, sir," suggested the astrogator.

"One," said Jerry, stepping out toward that blinding coruscation of heat. "Two," he said, feeling carefully for the next girder.

Then the toe of his boot slipped from the metal, and he realized, with a horrible lancing of adrenalin through his abdomen, that he was falling out the opening between the girders. The only salvation would be a shove with his still-braced rear foot, but that would carry him directly into the inferno of burning fuel. An eternity of falling through icy vacuum against an instant of intolerable searing pain....

"The fire--" gasped Jerry, toppling in inexorable slow motion toward starry darkness, a cloud of twirling chess pieces orbiting about his head. "I've got to make it into the fire...."

He tensed the muscles of the laggard leg for the spring that would carry him to destruction, and then he saw that the chess pieces were shimmering gray, and the oval frame of the doorway to the flaming fuel was shimmering gray, and even what had seemed hot white burning was cold gray waiting mist, and with a yell of remembrance, Jerry clamped shut his eyes and let himself plunge downward into nothingness....