The maneuver was unpleasant, for the alien seemed unconscious, flaccid and still, and mere physical closeness to the creature was repellent. The feel of the thick wettish “hand” pulsing feebly in my own was almost sickeningly ultimate. But at last I managed to maneuver myself dose enough to establish a common center of gravity between us—an axis on which I seemed to hover briefly suspended.
I pulled Haalvordhen’s “hand” into this weight—center in the bare inches of space between us, braced the needle, and resolutely stabbed with it.
The movement disturbed the brief artificial gravity, and Haalvordhen floated and bounced a little weightlessly in his skyhook. The “hand” went sailing back, the needle recoiling harmlessly. I swore out loud, now quite foolishly angry, and my own jerky movement of annoyance flung me partially across the cabin.
Inching slowly back, I tried to grit my teeth, but only succeeded with a snap that jarred my skull. In tense anger, I seized Haalvordhen’s “hand,” which had almost stopped its feverish pulsing, and with a painfully slow effort—any quick or sudden movement would have thrown me, in recoil, across the cabin again—I wedged Haalvordhen’s “hand” under the strap and anchored it there.
It twitched faintly—the Theradin was apparently still sensible to pain—and my stomach rose at that sick pulsing. But I hooked my feet under the skyhook’s frame, and flung my free arm down and across the alien, holding tight to the straps that confined him. Still holding him thus wedged down securely, I jabbed again with the needle. It touched, pricked—and then, in despair, I realized it could not penetrate the Theradin integument without weight and pressure behind it.
I was too absorbed now in what had to be done to care just how I did it. So I wrenched forward with a convulsive movement that threw me, full—length, across the alien’s body. Although I still had no weight, the momentum of the movement drove the hypodermic needle deeply into the flesh of the “hand.”
I pressed the catch, then picked myself up slowly, and looked around to see the crewman who had jeered at me with his head thrust through the lock again, regarding me with the distaste he had displayed toward the Theradin, from the first. To him I was lower than the Theradin, having degraded myself by close contact with a nonhuman.
Under that frigid, contemptuous stare, I was unable to speak. I could only silently withdraw the needle and hold it up. The rigid look of condemnation altered just a little, but not much. He remained silent, looking at me with something halfway between horror and accusation.
It seemed years, centuries, eternities that he clung there, just looking at me, his face an elongated ellipse above the tight collar of his black leathers. Then, without even speaking, he slowly withdrew his head and the lock contracted behind him, leaving me alone with my sickening feeling of contamination and an almost hysterical guilt. I hung the needle up on the air, curled myself into a ball, and, entirely unstrung, started sobbing like a fool.
It must have been a long time before I managed to pull myself together, because before I even looked to see whether Haalvordhen was still alive, I heard the slight buzzing noise which meant it was a meal—period and that food had been sent through the chute to our cabin. I pushed the padding listlessly aside, and withdrew the heat—sealed containers—one set colorless, the other set nonhuman fluorescent.
Tardily conscious of what a fool I’d been making of myself, I hauled my rations over to the skyhook, and tucked them into a special slot, so that they wouldn’t float away. Then, with a glance at the figure stretched out motionless beneath the safety—strap of the other skyhook, I shrugged, pushed myself across the cabin again, and brought the fluorescent containers to Haalvordhen.
He made a weary, courteous noise which I took for acknowledgment. By now heartily sick of the whole business, I set them before him with a bare minimum of politeness and withdrew to my own skyhook, occupying myself with the always—ticklish problem of eating m free—fell.
At last I drew myself up to return the containers to the chute, knowing we wouldn’t leave the cabin during the entire trip. Space, on a starship, is held to a rigid minimum. There is simply no room for untrained outsiders moving around in the cramped ship, perhaps getting dangerously close to critically delicate equipment, and the crew is far too busy to stop and keep an eye on rubbernecking tourists.
In an emergency, passengers can summon a crewman by pressing a call—button. Otherwise, as far as the crew was concerned, we were in another world.
I paused in midair to Haalvordhen’s skyhook. His containers were untouched and I felt moved to say, “Shouldn’t you try to eat something?”
The flat voice had become even weaker and more rasping now, and the nonhuman’s careful enunciation was slurred. Words of his native Samarran intermingled with queer turns of phrase which I expected were literally rendered from mental concepts.
“Heart—kind of you, thakkava Varga Miss, but late. Haalvordhen—I deep in grateful wishing—” A long spate of Samarran, thickly blurred followed, then as if to himself, “Theradin—we, die nowhere only on Samarra, and only a little tune ago Haalvordhen—I knowing must die, and must returning to home planet. Saata. Knowing to return and die there where Theradin—we around dying—” The jumble of words blurred again, and the limp “hands” clutched spasmodically, in and out.
Then, in a queer, careful tone, the nonhuman said, “But I am not living to return where I can stop—die. Not so long Haalvordhen—I be lasting, although Vargas—you Miss be helping most like real instead of alien. Sorry your people be most you unhelping—” he stopped again, and with a queer little grunting noise, continued, “Now Haalvordhen—I be giving Vargas—you stop—gift of heritage, be needful it is.”
The flaccid form of the nonhuman suddenly stiffened, went rigid. The drooping lids over the Theradin’s eyes seemed to unhood themselves, and in a spasm of fright I tried to fling myself backward. But I did not succeed. I remained motionless, held in a dumb fascination.
I felt a sudden, icy cold, and the sharp physical nausea crawled over me again at the harsh and sickening touch of the alien on my mind, not in words this time, but in a rapport even closer—a hateful touch so intimate that I felt my body go limp in helpless fits and spasms of convulsive shuddering under the deep, hypnotic contact.
Then a wave of darkness almost palpable surged up in my brain. I tried to scream, “Stop it, stop it!” And a panicky terror flitted in my last conscious thought through my head. This is why, this is the reason humans and telepathy don’t mix -
And then a great dark door opened under my senses and I plunged again into unconsciousness.
It was not more than a few seconds, I suppose, before the blackness swayed and lifted and I found myself floating, curled helplessly in mid—air, and seeing, with a curious detachment, the Theradin’s skyhook below me. Something in the horrid limpness of that form stirred me wide awake.
With a tight band constricting my breathing, I arrowed downward. I had never seen a dead Theradin before, but I needed no one to tell me that I saw one now. The constricting band still squeezed my throat in dry gasps, and in a frenzy of hysteria I threw myself wildly across the cabin, beating and battering on the emergency button, shrieking and sobbing and screaming. . .
They kept me drugged all the rest of the trip. Twice I remember waking and shrieking out things I did not understand myself, before the stab of needles in my arm sent me down into comforting dreams again. Near the end of the flight, while my brain was still fuzzy, they made me sign a paper, something to do with witnessing that the crew held no responsibility for the Theradin’s death.
It
