But . . . Right, Mr. Oestreicher. On the way.
As the first officer’s powerful personality took hold, the
raging storm of emotion and dream subsided gradually to a
sort of sullen background sea of fear, marked with fleeting
whitecaps of hysteria, and Arpe found himself able to think
his own thoughts again. There was no doubt about it: every-
one on board the Flyaway II had become suddenly and
totally telepathic.
But what could be the cause? It couldn’t be the field. Not
only was there nothing in the theory to account for it, but the
field had already been effective for nearly an hour, at this
same intensity, without producing any such pandemonium.
“My conclusion also,” Oestreicher said as Arpe came onto
the bridge. “Also you’ll notice that we can now see out of the
ship, and that the outside sensing instruments are registering
again. Neither of those things was true up to a few minutes
ago; we went blind as soon as the threshold was crossed.”
“Then what’s the alternative?” Arpe said. He found that it
helped to speak aloud; it diverted him from the undercurrent
of the intimate thoughts of everyone else. “It must be
characteristic of the space we’re in, then, wherever that is.
Any clues?”
“There’s a sun outside,” Stauffer said, “and it has planets.
I’ll have the figures for you in a minute. This I can say
right away, though: It isn’t Alpha Centauri. Too dim.”
Somehow, Arpe hadn’t expected it to be. Alpha Centauri
was in normal space, and this was obviously anything but
normal. He caught the figures as they surfaced in Stauffer’s