Zamm had stopped her pacing. She stood looking down at a big couch in the center of the room.
“You shouldn’t try mind-search now, Zamm!” The voice of the gigantic robot that was the ship came, almost anxiously, into the room. “You’ve been under severe emotional tensions throughout the past weeks!”
“I know,” she murmured. “Glad they got him back though—nice people; nice guy! We worried him, I think—” She kicked the side of the couch reflectively with the tip of one soft boot. “Those tensions might help, you know! Send the doll out and we’ll see.”
“The big one?” the voice inquired.
“No!” said Zamm with a sort of terror. “Can’t stand to look at him when I’m all alone. No, the little one—”
Somewhere in the ship a door opened and closed. After a few seconds, footsteps came running, lightly, swiftly. A small shape scampered into the room, stopped, glanced about with bright sharp eyes, saw Zamm and ran to her.
She opened her arms and swept up the shape as it flung itself at her laughing.
“What an artist made those masks!” she said wonderingly, her fingertips tracing over a cheek of the face that was very like her own and yet different. “You couldn’t tell by just touching—!” She smiled down at the shape cradled in her arms. “Fifteen years! Be a bigger boy now—but not too much. We don’t shoot up quick like those old A-Class humans, do we? But for that, we grow up smarter. Don’t we?”
The shape chuckled amiable agreement. Zamm blinked at it, half-smiling but alert, as if listening to something within herself. The dolls had very little in common with her working robots; they were designed to be visual hypnotics, compelling and dangerous agents that could permanently distort the fabric of sanity. Those of her people who had helped her in their design had done it reluctantly, though they understood the value of such devices for one who went searching in memory for what she had lost in time. With almost clinical detachment, she watched herself being drawn under the familiar compulsion that seemed to combine past and present, illusion and reality, until something stormy and cold washed suddenly through her face, slackening its features. Then she closed her eyes for a moment, and set the shape carefully back on its feet on the floor.
“Run along, little boy!” she told it absently, her face taut and blank once more. “Back to your place! Mother’s busy.”
Its gurgle of laughter merged into a receding rush of footsteps. Presently a door clicked shut again, somewhere.
Zamm went slowly to the couch and lay down on it, flat on her back, arms over her head.
“We’ll try mind-search now!” she said.
The robot made no comment. A half-score glassy tentacles came out from under the couch and began to fasten themselves here and there over Zamm’s body, coiled about her skull and glued flaring tips to her temples.
“I’m set,” she said. “Let it go!”
A faint humming rose from the wall. Her body stiffened suddenly, went rigid, and then relaxed completely.
* * *
There had been a brief awareness of cold, rushing inwards from all sides. But almost instantly, it reached and chilled the nerve-linkages at which it was directed.
Incoming sensation ceased with that, abruptly. Zamm’s brain swam alone, released, its consciousness diffused momentarily over an infinity of the what-had-been, the time-past—but also over deceptively similar infinities of the might-have-been, the never-was. Those swirling universes of events and symbols would crystallize now, obediently but not necessarily truthfully, into whatever pattern consciousness chose to impress on them.
The brain could fool itself there! But it had an ally who wouldn’t be tricked.
It ordered:
“Back to just before it began!”
Swarm after swarm of neurons woke suddenly to the spreading advance of the robot’s stimulating, probing forces through their pathways. Million-factored time-past events formed briefly, were discarded and combined anew. At last, familiar images began to flick up and reel away within the brain. Remembered sound crashed; remembered warmth swept in—pain, cold, touch, rest.
Hate, love, terror—possession, loss.
“We’re there! Where it began.”
There was the darkened cabin on the doomed spaceliner; only a small pool of amber light glowed against one tapestried wall. Distant and faint came the quivering of gigantic engines.
“They hadn’t quite worked the shake out of them, those days,” Zamm’s brain remembered.
She lay on the cabin’s big bed, lazing, content, half asleep on her side, blinking at the amber glow. She’d been first to take note of the rest period’s arrival and come back to the cabin. As usual.
” . . . used to love to sleep, those days!”
Her menfolk were still playing around somewhere in the vacation ship’s variously and beautifully equipped playrooms. The big one and the little one—should be getting more rest, both of them! What’s a vacation for, otherwise?
Zamm was beginning to wonder idly just where they’d gone to loiter this time, when the amber light flickered twice
“It’s begun!”
* * *
Roar of sound, flash of light! Then the blaring attack-alarm from the cabin’s communicator was cut short; and a body went flip-flopping crazily about the room like an experimental animal speared by an electric current. Everywhere, the liner’s injured artificial gravs were breaking circuits, reforming instantly, breaking at other points; and reforming again. And holding at last, locked into a new, emergency-created pattern.
But in the cabin was darkness and unconsciousness, while over the fifteen years, for the two-thousandth time, Zamm’s brain strained and tore for the one look out, the one identifiable sound—perhaps even a touch. A fraction of a second might be all she’d need!
And it had lasted two hours, that period! For two hours, they swarmed about the ship they had murdered, looting, despoiling, dragging away the ones still alive and not too badly hurt. They must have come into the cabin more than once, prowled about it, stared at her, touched her. Gone on—
But—nothing.
Full consciousness emerged suddenly at the same point as always. Then the body went crawling and scrambling up the tilted flat of a floor, tilted irrevocably now in the new gravitational pattern the stricken liner had achieved for its rigor mortis. Broken bone in lower right arm, right ankle flapping loosely—like the splintered cabin door overhead, that flapped from what was now one edge of a tilted ceiling! From somewhere within the ship came the steady roar of atomic fires; and then sudden sounds like the yelping of animals, rising into long shrieks.
“The ray-burned ones!” gasped Zamm, as the clambering body stiffened in horror, unmoving, listening. “But those weren’t mine!” she screamed. “I checked them all!” She caught herself. “Wait—I’ll have to go through that period again.”
“You can’t do that twice!” the robot’s voice said. “Not now. Not that part!”
“Well—” It was right, of course. It usually was. “Get on with the sequence then!”
“Even that’s too dangerous. You’re nearly exhausted, Zamm!”
But the body reached for the edge of the door, hung on with the good arm, kicked with both legs and wriggled over awkwardly into a bright-lit corridor, slanted upward at a nightmarish angle. Other bodies lay there, in tumbled piles, not moving.
“If I hadn’t stopped to check those—If I’d looked up sooner—just a few seconds sooner!”
One by one, the lost seconds passed away as always, and then the body suddenly looked up. A bright glare filled the upper end of the tilted corridor. Something had moved within that glare of light—had just crossed the corridor and was disappearing again down another hallway that angled off it, slanting downwards. The light followed the moving shape like a personal shadow and vanished behind it.
“Working in individual light-barriers, making a last check before they left,” murmured Zamm, while the body crawled and hobbled toward the point where the light had been, screaming with terror, rage, question and despair.
“If I’d looked up that moment sooner, I’d have seen what they were like, even in space armor—human or what. I’d have seen!”
She found herself staring up at the ceiling of her ship’s control room, muttering the worn old words.
She stirred stiffly but made no attempt to sit up.
“Nearly went out here,” she said tonelessly.
“That was dangerous, Zamm,” said the robot-voice. “I warned you.”
“No harm done!” she said. “Next time, we’ll just work the unconscious period through all by itself.”
She lay quiet, her mouth bitter. Somewhere in memory, as somewhere in space, were points where she might pick up their trail. Things she had experienced in those hours but not consciously remembered. Scattered groups of cells within the bony box that enclosed her brain still held them locked.
Statistically, it couldn’t happen that she would ever flood any specific group of cells with the impulse-pattern that revived those specific flickers of memory. Statistically, it would be a whole lot easier even to pick the one sun-system and planet where they might be out of the numberless fiery cells that were the galaxy’s body!