Chapter V

"You've been through the Little Death before," said Saxon. He and Murdock, the T.I.S. agent, were in the control room, Murdock's eye glued to the scanner. "What's it like, Murdock?"

The gaunt, frosty T.I.S. agent took his eyes from the scanner, faced Saxon.

"Not so bad," he replied laconically.

"I've heard it's a pretty rugged experience."

Murdock allowed himself a tight smile. "That depends on how active a social consciousness you have. You're a non-Newtonian physicist. You know the Pachner conception of the space-time continuum better than I do. Villainowski's stellar drive inverts the Newtonian concept that a vehicle travels through space during a passage of time. It operates through time during a passage of space.

"Yes, yes," Saxon interrupted impatiently. "But the effects of the time field.... What do you experience while the ship is in the time field?"

"That's the Little Death," replied Murdock in a dry voice, "though the name is misleading. Actually you experience a segment of your own life, either the past, the future, or the present. As Villainowski would explain it, time is co-existent, while in the time field our lives are spread out around us, but because we're equipped with three-dimensional sense organs we're restricted to a single series of episodes anywhere along our life span."

Saxon frowned and said, "In other words, it's just as if we returned to the past and relived some incident that occurred to us before?"

"Right. Or into the future and experienced something that hasn't happened yet."

Saxon's frown deepened. "But what's so rugged about that?"

"Nothing," rejoined Murdock dryly, "if you've lived an exemplary life. It's not pleasant, though, to live over and over again a period when you committed murder say, or were terribly frightened, or even did some little thing that you've been trying your best to forget since."

Saxon, caught a brief mental flash from the T.I.S. agent, as he shoved the picture of a girl with pretty Slavic features out of his mind.

"I'm not looking forward to the Little Death!" Murdock said dryly, and returned his eye to the scanner.

Saxon leaned back in the acceleration chair. The captain was bending over the three-dimensional space-charts along with the third mate. A spaceman stood at the robot pilot. Another, whom Murdock had replaced at the scanner, was reclining in a second acceleration chair.

There was an air of tension in the control room. Saxon realized suddenly that the captain was checking the robot controls.

That could mean only one thing. It was nearing time for Villainowski to switch the _Shooting Star_ onto the stellar drive. They would be going into the Little Death any moment. Saxon sat up abruptly. "How long before we switch over, Captain?"

The captain looked up from the charts. "We've attained minimum velocity. Villainowski's in the engine room now. I'm expecting orders to turn her over right away."

Murdock turned from the scanner again, fixed Saxon with his pale blue eyes.

"By the way, Jon, you've been prowling the ship from stem to stern the past three days." His voice was pitched too low to reach the officers checking the star maps and robot controls. "Have you a line on Q62 yet?"

Saxon could read suspicion in the T.I.S. agent's mind. "No," he admitted, "and I'm more puzzled than you. Ileth doesn't know who Q62 is, or even if he's aboard, although she's been commanded by General Atomic to take her orders from him."

"You're sure of that?"

"Yes. I'm sure of it."

There was a pause, each man busy with his own thoughts.

"I'd swear," Saxon broke the silence, "that Q62 isn't aboard, nor any other General Atomic agents."

Murdock regarded him speculatively and Saxon caught his thought, "_What the hell makes him so damned sure?_"

* * * * *

Sure? Saxon thought to himself. He wasn't sure about anything. The alien stowaway was still aboard. His sixth sense had warned him of her nearness a hundred times during his sporadic jaunts about the ship. But he had been unable to establish contact with her.

He had kept his mind open to the wash of thoughts from crew and staff, but, so far as he had been able to learn, they were all loyal to Government. Not even in their secret innermost thoughts had he discovered any evidence that a traitor was aboard.

Murdock interrupted his reflections, asking, "Have you any idea what that N.P.A. had discovered before he died?"

Saxon started, looked at the T.I.S. agent uncomfortably. Murdock's irrelevant question had conjured a vivid picture in his mind of the death of the N.P.A. in Villainowski's office.

"I don't know," he said miserably, beginning to understand how uncomfortable the Little Death might be. "I would give a lot to know. He may have had a clue to what I am."

Murdock's cold blue eyes narrowed, and he regarded Saxon with a peculiar intensity. "_That's a devilish odd way for him to put it_," the T.I.S. agent was thinking. "_What he is! Now why the hell would he say that?_"

Saxon realized with chagrin that he had made a slip. He should have said, "Who I am," not "What I am." No human ever doubted that he was a genuine specimen of _homo sapiens_.

The engine room telegraph buzzed suddenly, and when the captain answered, Villainowski's voice reached the two men.

"Sound the general alarm, Captain. Turn the ship over to the robot control. We're going into the Little Death."

"Right," said the captain. He looked pale and worn and older. He snapped off the telegraph, turned to the third. "Sound the general alarm and turn on the public address system, then go to your cabin." The third nodded, reached for the switch.

An ugly clangor broke through the _Shooting Star_ from stem to stern, followed immediately by a harsh metallic voice issuing from strategically placed audios.

"All officers, members of unlicensed personnel and staff report to your quarters at once and lie on your bunks."

There was a series of clicks as the ship went smoothly over to the robot controls.

The command ordering everyone to their cabins was repeated three more times.

Saxon realized there was no one in the control room, but himself, Murdock, and the captain.

"Coming?" asked the captain from the doorway.

"In a minute," Murdock replied.

The captain departed hastily, and Saxon followed the T.I.S. agent across the deck to the control board, where a single dial was marked off in parsecs.

"I'm damned curious about this four dimensional drive," Murdock confessed, as he dropped into an acceleration chair before the dial. "I've been through it before. But I'd like to follow its operation here in the control room as long as possible before we blank out. Are you game?"

"Sure," Saxon's voice was eager. He took a seat beside Murdock, staring at the dial marked off in parsecs with fascination.

He became conscious of a sobering silence. The robot controls had cut off the jets. A giddy feeling of weightlessness possessed him.

Suddenly the radiograph began to click off a message. He saw Murdock frown, tear off the tape, read it.

"Good Lord!" the T.I.S. agent burst out. "Read it! We've got to get to Villainowski before we go onto the stellar drive!" He leaped to his feet, went soaring in the air, a pained expression on his face. Murdock had forgotten their weightless condition now that the jets were off.

Saxon who had snatched the strip of paper, flashed his eye over the words.

IMPERIAL HEADQUARTERS:

TO CHIEF J. VILLAINOWSKI. URGENT. ORDERS CANCELLED. TURN BACK
TO EARTH WITHOUT DELAY. ALL FIVE COPIES OF STELLAR DRIVE STOLEN.
GOVERNMENT CANNOT RISK YOUR LIFE IN DEEP SPACE UNTIL YOU CAN
REPLACE PLANS.

MUSTAPHA IX.

Saxon realized the machine was still clicking off the message over and over again.

Murdock had pushed himself to the bulkhead, where he kicked off, gliding through the door. Saxon followed cautiously, conscious of a yellow mist collecting in the control room.

The T.I.S. agent got just beyond the doorway when he floated unconscious to the deck.

Saxon made it to the head of the ladder. Then he, too, lost control over his muscles.

The mist was like soup, thick yellow pea soup.

His last conscious thought was, "So this is the Little Death!"

* * * * *

"Here! Why are you crying?" asked the big white giant. His voice was gentle, compassionate, and he was naked except for a kilt of a strange gleaming material like woven light.

"But I don't want to go," Saxon protested in a reedy, childish tone. He realized in dismay that the giant wasn't a giant at all, but normal and man-sized. "I don't want to go," he heard himself tearfully repeating.

They were in a room, the little boy that had been Saxon and the big white man, and a door across the room was opening. The little boy that was Saxon shrank against the man.

A woman appeared in the doorway. She was tall and beautiful and dressed like the man in a gleaming kilt. She smiled at Saxon, but he was not reassured. He hung back from crossing the threshold.

Saxon saw a troubled look pass between the two. Then the man steeled himself, picked up the squirming boy, carried him through the doorway.

It was a strange sensation that possessed the mature Saxon, stretched on the cold deck at the head of the ladder to the engine room. He wasn't dreaming. He was the little boy, and yet he seemed to be outside himself, watching his own actions, appraising himself like the detached half of a dual personality.

He was in the time field, Saxon realized. That was it! He was reliving a segment of his life span that had taken place before he was eleven!

His heart leaped spasmodically. At last the curtain was being raised on those blank years of childhood!

The room into which the man carried him, Saxon saw, was larger that the anteroom and cluttered with strange machinery, ugly machinery. The far wall was a solid bank of windows, through which he could see a green meadow rolling gently away to blue foothills in the distance. Light poured through the windows from a blazing sun high overhead and a second orange sun was just rising.

The man deposited him in a chair. Saxon quit thrashing, as the woman fitted a skull-cap over his head, making minute adjustments. A cable led from the peak of the skull-cap to a frightening machine which the woman bent over next, and set in operation.

Saxon could feel a rush of thought pouring into his brain. Queer thoughts couched in semantically obscure words.

One stood out. "_Earth._" It was repeated many times before he began to comprehend the import of the alien symbols. "_Earth is the third planet of a star known to its inhabitants as Sol!_"

With a feeling of strangeness the Saxon who observed realized that the boy was being taught to speak English!

* * * * *

Saxon shook his head groggily, pushed himself to his hands and knees and found himself floating six feet in the air. He had forgotten that the jet drive was still off.

It came back with a suddenness that flung Saxon to the metal deck.

He scrambled to his feet, his mind in a whirl. Forgotten temporarily were the emergency orders commanding them to return to Earth. If Villainowski had been right, then Saxon had actually relived an event which had transpired before he was eleven.

Then who the hell was he?

He returned to the control room, stepping over the unconscious body of Murdock, who had not yet recovered from the effects of the time field.

The dial on the control board read 1.3 parsecs!

He jumped for the scanner, clamped his eye to the aperture, and immediately jumped back!

Dead ahead was a huge blazing sun!

It looked so close that the _Shooting Star_ appeared to be falling straight into the maw of erupting atomic energy.

But reason returned, and he knew they must still be millions of miles away. He went back to the scanner, spotting first a second sun not so close, then a third, small and red like a fiery coin.

The ternary system of Alpha Centauri! They were out of the Solar System!

"Please," said a girl's voice behind him. "Stand back from the scanner! Don't try for your gun, Saxon, or I will be forced to shoot!"

Saxon whirled around.

Ileth Urban stood in the doorway, a dart gun leveled at his stomach. Behind her, he saw the shame-faced Murdock surrounded by the crew. Murdock was helpless, his arms in the air.

"The crew have mutinied," said Ileth. "The ship is now under the control of General Atomic."

Saxon's jaw sagged. He said, "So you are Q62." It wasn't so much a question as a statement. He knew. He could read it in her thoughts. But why hadn't he been able to see it there before?

It wasn't possible, but there could be no doubt. Ileth Urban was Q62.

Then the thoughts of the men in the corridor made themselves felt. Every man jack of them had gone over to General Atomic, not recently, but weeks and months ago, before they had ever left Earth.

He dropped into a chair, his head in his hands. How had they been able to disguise their thoughts all this time?

He looked at Ileth in her chartreuse green short-waisted jacket. She held the dart gun leveled at his chest. Her patrician features were set in grim unhappy lines.

"Something!" Saxon thought wildly, "Something has gone terribly wrong!"