Not all-wise, nor all-powerful. I wish they were; for they are kind."

"You sound like nice people," Newlin admitted. "I wish I could believe you. Off-hand, I think you're crazy. You say we're all off the beam.

Then you talk like delusions of grandeur, and I have reason to know you can be homicidal. One of us is nuts. It's a toss-up."

Songeen smiled wearily. "It is possible that I am infected. I am inoculated against it, but so was Genarion. Will you believe that I loved him? He was my husband. We were children together, like brother and sister. Later, we were schooled together, were married, and asked to be a.s.signed our task together. I did not sentence him, and I would have died myself first. But he had been here too long. If he had gone back, the contagion would have gone with him. It was fated. You and I were mere tools. Weapons."

"I'm sorry, Songeen. I do believe you loved him."

She shook her head in curious ruffle of emotion. "He was not the first.

Many of our kind have renounced their birthright to go among your people, become like you and share your hideous lives. They are part of your great religions, part of the legendary history of your races."

Silence fell between them. Newlin thought of dying Mars, the burnt-out husk of Venus, the political and economic pesthole of Earth--even the grim, gray, terrible frontiers on the further planets and moons. His recollections were a dreadful pageant of spectres, of an ugly, terror-haunted childhood, of the bleak years of his barren, lonely wanderings--the memory kitbag of a homeless, and often hunted, s.p.a.ceb.u.m.

"I can believe you," Newlin admitted slowly. "Most of the truly worthwhile leaders of mankind stand so far above the mob that they seem cast in a different mold. The real leaders--not politicians, nor military bra.s.s. The thinkers and scientists, even the prophets. Every great religion sprang from the vision or inspiration of a single leader.

Beyond the chaff, the fragments of his actual thoughts and words--always sound good. But their followers don't follow them."

Songeen's face twisted in bitter wrath. "How terribly true! Can blind men follow the sun? They feel its warmth and reach out to it, but they stumble and fall on their own clay feet. Blind eyes and hands can never reach the light. Most of our emissaries, of that kind, die horribly, and their message is distorted to serve the ends of madness and corruption."

"Is there no hope for us?"

She stared at him. The pale glow of her moonbright eyes softened and intensified.

"One hope, and only in yourselves. We have tried and failed. If you feel so strongly, why have you done nothing?"

Bitter hatred snagged in Newlin's throat, making his laugh a sound of horror. "Not me. I can pity the ma.s.ses of poor and down-trodden, but only as ma.s.ses. As abstractions. Individually, I loathe them. Cornered rats will fight back--but men lick the boots of their tormentors. I learned only hate and defiance. I'm a cornered rat, not a man."

There was sound now, outside the door they had entered. Low at first, a mere scrabbling, as if the trackers had located their refuge. In moments only, there came a heavy pounding, followed by the skirl of atomic drills. Newlin tensed, his hand itching at the b.u.t.t of his blaster.

"I'm a rat," he went on. "Cornered, like any other rat. And the terriers are out there scratching at my hole. If you'll open that non-squeak door, I'll talk to them. Maybe even kill a few."

"No," said Songeen positively. "No killing."

"But I'm a killer," Newlin insisted. "I've killed men before for a lot less reason. They're mining the door. How long do you think that will last against explosives?"

"Not long," the girl admitted. "But long enough. I have the key at last.

Stand back."

Something formless and faintly radiant hovered indescribably in s.p.a.ce.

Suspended above the worn flooring, without visible support or tangible outline--it existed. Something like weird emptiness, a void appearing in the air itself.

"This is the portal," Songeen told him calmly. "Choose now. I will take you with me if I can without permission. But do not come with me, unwarned. There is grave peril, beyond anything I can describe to you.

Beyond your experience or imagination. I will try to get you safely back, somehow. But I can promise nothing. And if you stay too long, there is no coming back. You must remain there; even if the terror of your surroundings kills you."

She stood beside the mysterious doorway, waiting. Newlin made a start to follow her, then balked.

"Wait!" he ordered roughly, as she was about to lead the way. "I can't go with you--not like this."

"Afraid?"

"Yes, but not of you or your world. I trust you. But you say everyone here is crazy. That it's infectious. Won't I carry the contagion into your world?"

Songeen hesitated. Shadows deepened inside her eyes. "You would, yes.

But you will have contact with no one but me. Perhaps with the Masters--if I can take you to them. They may help us, but they are strange, unpredictable. Remember, I promise nothing and you come at your own risk. But your disease will harm no one--I'm inoculated, and the Masters are immune. If you overstay the limit and cannot return, you will be decontaminated just as we must be when we return to our own people.

"Here, in this room, is the place where the people of our colony on Venus were decontaminated before they could be allowed to enter the place of refuge the Masters had prepared for them. It is a cruel and harrowing experience. I know. There may be a way to get you safely back, without that. But your mind could never stand the shock. Understand that, before you choose."

"If it won't harm you, I'll go along," Newlin decided. "Almost any world would be an improvement on this."

"Don't be too sure," she warned. "At worst, the terror here is familiar.

Come, then. Hold my hand, stay close, and try not to be frightened. It will be bad enough. And try not to change too much, or I will have difficulty returning you alive."

The portal swallowed her, and Newlin felt himself drawn into the force-vortex, still clinging to her hand.

Transition was mild enough, less shock than he had expected.

A moment of chill detachment, as if something indescribably cold shattered his body into component atoms and readjusted them to new patterns. He gasped, his body making the same thermal changes as if he stood under a cold shower. He shivered.

Then it was like coming out of the blanketing fog of horror into the sunlight of sanity; like rebirth, painlessly, into an eery other-dimension.

There was light and sound about him, a stir of cool air. Songeen had become separated from him in that moment of strange pa.s.sage. She stood apart, watching him with laughter in her eyes. Laughter as cool and calm and soothing as the soft wind that riffled her hair. She had stripped off the bulky armor, shed her plastic helmet. Now she was all woman again, and somehow, oddly, a symbol of all women.

Other senses than his five sprang into life within him. Weird _awareness_ through new perceptions which were nameless to his mind or to his memory.

At first there was no terror, no surprise. Merely an overwhelming _difference_.

Overhead was starless night, but not darkness. It was a vaulted, infinite sky, like an inverted ocean of tinted crystal, transparent, but softly colored, deepening imperceptibly to a heart of emerald, a-glow with faintest witchlights. All around him was a maze of shimmering crystal in odd forms, grotesque, clear but echoing the witchlights of that haunted sky.

Wind-borne, came the faint, sweet chiming of distinct porcelain bells.

The place was alive with movement, sensed but incompletely seen. Even the wind flowed in almost visible currents, thickened as if the air had become dense, molten gla.s.s. All forms in the maze of crystal varied constantly. Light flared and died in odd rhythms, and the almost visible winds played icy arpeggios upon strings of spun gla.s.s, like Aeolian harps. Showering notes like those of Chinese windbells hung in cl.u.s.ters in the eddies of great wind rivers, and both sound and light flowed together and wove strange patterns and infinite variations.

It was not quite pleasant, vaguely nerve-tightening, but highly stimulating. Sound was muted at first, as was the light. Images blurred and outlines were unsteady, baffling. Everything fused and flowed together like half molten shards of broken gla.s.s. Wavelengths of troubled sound formed trembling notes that hung in the air, almost visible, crystalline and somehow painfully dissonant.

Like Songeen, her world or the pathway to it was strange, alien, but poignantly beautiful.

It was stranger than he thought.

He realized almost at once that his mind was making adjustments. It was lying to him, translating unfamiliar concepts into terms known to memory. It was diluting and enfeebling his sensations. But dread grew in him.

When his mind tired, stopped lying to him, what would it really be like?

Could he stand the factual perception?

They trod the forest aisles of crystalline forms. There was light, of odd, gray, glary kind. A twilight, silvery, unreal as the trans-Lunar dreams of drugged poets. Songeen moved ahead slowly, making no effort to regain her clasp of his hand. Almost she seemed to avoid him, waiting until he almost overtook her, then skimming lightly away from him. Her slim, pale witchery was both taunt and challenge. She appeared to float rather than walk.

One by one she dropped her clinging robes. She became part of the mad forest, part of its dreamy gray enchantments.