“No.”

  “Johann, your eyes look bad. Listen, I don’t know what you’re taking, but you at least ought to lie down on your bunk. You must have just drifted out of your sandals, and you hit something.”

  “I’m not taking anything.” He was becoming aware of disorientation. Grit was standing below him, not above him; because he was staring into a corner, the room had seemed to rise in a pointed arch, like a tent.

  “Come down.” She pulled him with her small, soft arms; but it was too hard—he came down with a crash, striking his bad knee against the floor; eventually she managed to get him seated on the edge of his bunk. “I’m not taking anything,” he said again.

  “I wasn’t going to ask you for some.”

  “I don’t care if you do or not. If I’m taking something, where is it? You should have seen it floating around, or on the table.”

  “You might have swallowed all you had,” Grit said practically. “Or the rush might not have come that fast. You could have had time to put it away.”

  “There isn’t anything. I fell asleep—that’s all. I must have made some motion in my sleep that broke me loose from the chair.”

  “When you’re asleep and hit something you wake up. At least I do.” Grit had gotten a cloth from somewhere and soaked it at the recycler; now she was pressing it against the cut on his forehead. “Did you faint?”

  “I fell asleep. I told you.” Johann slipped a hand inside her blouse. Grit had good breasts, high and rather pointed, surprising in view of her chubby frame. He touched one and she turned and stepped away. “Don’t do that.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t have to do it. I don’t have to be here at all.”

  “Yes you do.”

  “Not if there’s reason to suspect contagion. Read the regulations, Lieutenant. Any woman can refuse when there is legitimate reason to suspect the existence of infectious disease. Until the man has been certified in good health by a medic. I came in here and you were floating around unconscious, and you say you haven’t been taking anything; so you’ve got some disease, and who knows what it is?”

  “It won’t do you any good,” Johann told her. “I’ll just get a health card, and you’ll have to come back again.”

  Grit shook her head, tossing floating yellow-brown curls, and opened the door of the compartment. For a moment the light was dazzling; then the door slammed shut, and twilight returned. He found his sandals near the bunk, slipped them on, and tried to stand up and take a step; he was still too weak and sat down again. His shadow, on the opposite wall, had grown black as space itself; where it fell, nothing, no slightest detail of table or chair or personal belongings, could be seen. He gripped the side of his bunk, wishing he were exercising in the centrifuge, where the counterfeited gravity…

  Attempting to overcome his dizziness by sheer will, he closed his eyes.

  Someone whispered.

  He opened his eyes in bewilderment. As well as he could tell in the dimness, the compartment was empty. He forced himself to his feet, went to the door, and locked it. Dark as it was, it was impossible that anyone could be concealed in the compartment. He threw himself down on his bunk again, but it seemed to him that this time his shadow aped his motions a hundredth of a second late. “Who’s there?” Johann said. “I know someone’s in here. Where are you?”

  There was no response.

  “That hag Ottilie,” he said under his breath. “She put something in the kaf.” He closed his eyes, and a sighing wind he knew to be unreal filled the compartment. There was the soft sound of air-blown sand, dry and insistent, and the scuttling of a small animal. Someone whispered: “Friend?”

  “Yes,” he said, without opening his eyes.

  · · · ·

  Karl, the medical officer, was a skeletal man with burning eyes. Johann told him he wanted a health card, and that he had drifted from his bunk while sleeping, hit his head, and had a strange dream.

  “A minor concussion,” Karl said. “Typical.” He waved toward the diagnostic cabinet at one side of the room. “Strip and get in.”

  Johann unbuttoned his blouse, stepped out of his shorts, and backed into the cabinet; it hummed briefly as it transmitted its information to the central computer and received processed conclusions. “You have contusions on your forehead,” Karl said, reading the output screen. “And lacerations on your arms and legs. How did you get those?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come out and let me have a look at them.”

  Johann stepped out. “You have a nice leg,” Karl said. “Good shoulders too. Very virile—you know, they ought to have books for us. Lie down on the table and I’ll take care of those scratches.”

  “I had a dream,” Johann told him, “when I hit my head. I suppose while I was floating around the compartment.”

  “This is going to sting a little.”

  “I was on Neuerddraht, walking through sand. I walked and walked; and after a long time I came to a chasm—so suddenly it seemed to open at my feet. It was full of waterfalls and natural fountains, kind of a vertical garden of water, and giant ferns and orchids.”

  · · · ·

  When Johann went on watch, he saw the expedition in the wall communicator screen, camped on a naked tor rising above the tangled vegetation of the planet. Elis, the duty officer of the preceding watch, came up behind him and said, “Well, what about it. You think this is it?”

  Johann shook his head.

  “She does—anyway, she’s going to try to sell the government on the idea. She said so. Anyway, why not?”

  “I think living on planets may be a mistake,” Johann said. “I’ve told you.”

  “You have some strange ideas.”

  “There aren’t enough planets. Look at how long we’ve looked for this one; it’s as if some animal decided to eat nothing but four-leaf clovers. Planets are the accidents of the universe.”

  Elis shrugged. “We’re going to say we found a four-leaf clover, then. Everyone—except maybe for you—wants to go home. And this is the quickest way; we spend two years here and go back reporting success.”

  “You can’t breathe the air.”

  Behind him, the Captain said, “You noticed, clever devil that you are, Johann.”

  Johann turned and saluted.

  “No wonder you are wise—I see someone has knocked some sense into you. What is it, Johann, that renders the air of Neuerddraht unsuitable? A surfeit of ammonia? Insufficient oxygen?”

  “I don’t know, sir. It’s just that I’ve noticed that the expedition has to wear breathing equipment.”

  For a moment, the Captain’s thin mouth curved with a smile. She touched her jet-black hair. “The air of Neuerddraht, Lieutenant, is twenty-two percent oxygen, seventy-six percent nitrogen, and two percent carbon dioxide and trace gases—an eminently satisfactory mixture for human respiration.”

  “Then why does the expedition—”

  “I don’t answer questions, Johann, I ask them. I overheard you say that the air of Neuerddraht is unbreathable. That is not correct, and I have now so informed you; if it should come to my attention that you have made that statement again, I will see to it that you are disciplined for disseminating false information. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I have a report from the medical officer to the effect that you showed him self-inflicted lacerations in an attempt to be certified unfit for duty. In the future we will have a good part of our personnel down on Neuerddraht, and we will need everyone up here; regulations will be carried out to the letter, and nothing is going to be overlooked. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir. I would like to be assigned to the landing party, sir.”

  “I am quite confident, Johann, that you are ingenious enough to get yourself certified unfit if you want. If you do, I advise you to perform your duty—here—anyway; and never to show me the certificate.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Captain turned away. The soles of her sandals were of the same material—or at least were supposed to be of the same material—as all the others; nevertheless her footsteps seemed to ring on the steel plates.

  Grit was yeoman of the watch, a fact Johann had failed to note when he came on duty. When she walked past him carrying her clipboard, he said, “This isn’t your watch.”

  “I’m filling in for Gerta; she asked me to. Did you get your health card?”

  Johann nodded.

  “When should I be there?”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  Grit smiled. She had small, very regular teeth. “Somebody else? You’ll have to wait five weeks for me, then.”

  He showed her that his book was still unsigned, and she looked at him oddly and went away.

  · · · ·

  When the watch was over and he returned to his compartment, Emil and sour little Heinz were waiting for him. Heinz had brought an old iron incense burner; it stood in the middle of the table, which he had moved to the center of the compartment. The perfumed smoke, suffocatingly heavy, hung in the air as Johann asked them what they wanted.

  “Heinz desires to do you honor,” Emil explained. “He was afraid to come himself, but I told him you like me, and said I’d come with him.”

  “I don’t like you,” Johann said.

  “It’s all right for you to talk like that when we’re alone, but I wish you wouldn’t when someone else is around. I have feelings; I’m not wood, Johann.”

  Heinz said hesitantly, “We mixed two sands three times, and each time under the black light we read your name. Gerhart and Elsa dreamed of you on the same night. The long stroke of the J, topped by a circle, is the ancient symbol of masculine power; the closed curve of the O indicates mastery of femininity as well; the H gate divides flesh and spirit; across it, A is a triangle, one of the oldest signs of God, with legs—this represents the power of God walking in the world; the doubled Ns confer the mystique of twinness—of the Gemini, and Romulus and Remus. In times of crisis a priest appears—a mediator between humanity and the unimaginable powers. We believe you are that priest.”

  “And you, I suppose, are my congregation,” Johann said, sitting down. Heinz and Emil were standing, and they did not sit when he did, though the bunk was behind them.

  “There are more of us,” Heinz said. “We are here only as delegates.” He had thin, lank hair, worn too long, and he ran his fingers through it as he spoke—the nervous gesture of a schoolboy who does not know what to do with his hands when he recites.

  “Don’t imagine that I think the Captain is the only power on the ship,” Johann said, “or even the greatest. I know there are other power centers, and that not all of them are aware of all the others. But if you think that I am such a center, you are bigger fools than the people who think the Captain is in full control of everything. And can you please tell me why it is you feel we’ve reached a time of crisis?”

  “Earth is sick,” Emil said. “We all know that, even though we may disagree as to just which peculiarities are morbid symptoms—”

  Johann said, “Skip that.”

  “But here, perhaps…”

  Heinz said, “A fresh start. We will plant a colony here. Later, new settlers from Earth—”

  “Earth is dead,” Johann told them. “We’ve been searching for a habitable world for years, traveling at near-light speeds. Several hundred years have passed on Earth, and the famines were already coming every decade or so when we left; what do you think it was like a hundred years later?”

  “Really,” Emil began, “I—”

  Johann ignored him. He was looking at a point on the ceiling and flexed his hands as he spoke as though he were shaping clay. “Look back five hundred years. Everything valued then is dead now: beauty in architecture and language—freedom—the family, kinship, the tribe—all the relationships of blood, all dead. Religion, the dream of objective justice, the very ideas of a garden and a forest—all dead.” “Religion isn’t dead,” Heinz said. “I was a diabolist back on Earth.”

  Emil shrugged off the argument. “We’re supposed to find a place and go back.”

  “The returning ships, if there are any, will reestablish humanity on Earth. If Earth is still capable of supporting human life.”

  Heinz opened his censer and examined the incense. It had gone out, and he took a metal box from his gadget bag, extracted a rose-colored cone, and lit it with an evermatch. “The point is,” he said, “that you agree with us—and with those we represent—that this is a time of crisis. A few days ago the first of us set foot on a new world. Soon it will be decided who is to stay and who to go. You believe—or pretend to believe—in the Einsteinian doctrine that holds that the discrepancy in time induced by great velocities is real and permanent. I favor the more modern belief that it is merely apparent and subjective and will vanish if the return follows the same route, just as a continuing sound is canceled by a phase-opposed echo. But this is a critical period, nonetheless. We spoke of power centers; those who remain here are unlikely to be disturbed for some years, and not all power centers will be present in the colony.”

  “You want to go down there,” Johann said.

  Heinz and Emil nodded, Emil something less than positively.

  “I thought I was the only one,” Johann said. “But if I had the power to influence such things, I would be down there myself.” He looked at the floor, and the two understood that the interview was over.

  “Would you like this?” Heinz said, extending his censer and metal box of incense. Johann shook his head, but Heinz left both on the table anyway.

  When he and Emil were gone, Johann opened the vent wide. His shadow danced on the wall opposite the light, and he again felt the suspicion that its motions were not properly coordinated with his own. Standing as close as he could to the single fixture that still functioned, he examined the lacerations on his arms, pulling off the bandages Karl had put there. Self-inflicted or not, they were surely too deep and narrow for him to have made with his nails while he slept. He turned away from the light, and felt sand rasp beneath his feet. His chair was gone, and the light in which he had been studying the scratches on his arms was Algol, now almost entirely eclipsed by its obscure companion. Gravity tugged at him, and a wind laden with an odor he could not identify, a sweet scent that might have been a fire in a flower garden or the smoke of myrrh cast into a crucible, beat against his face and moved the sand, singing, across his feet. In the far distance, black against Algol’s ghostly ring of light, he could see a line of trees; turning his face to the stinging wind, he began to walk toward them.

  “Don’t look behind you.”

  The voice was no more than a whisper. He continued to walk, looking straight ahead.

  “Bear to your right. Only a step. There is no path, but you will find the way more open there.”

  He turned his head.

  “Please. If you look behind you I can no longer speak to you.”

  “Are you the blow on my head? Or did Ottilie slip something into my kaf because I tried to talk to Gretchen?”

  There was no reply.

  “If I see you, you can no longer talk to me—is that it?”

  “Yes.” There was a note of relief in the whisper. “I was afraid you would not believe me.”

  “Was it you who brought me here?”

  “No. Will you believe me? I promise I speak only the truth.”

  “Promises no longer hold. There is nothing left to swear by. No honor, no God.”

  “You still have the word. I found it in your mind.”

  “I read old books—what is it you want me to believe?”

  “You brought me here. I am grateful. For a time I feared I could never return. Do not look.”

  “I brought you?”

  “From your mind I have learned that your race has long held the power to go from place to place without traversing the intervening space. The words are astral projection and apportation.”

  “Then I am really here.”

  “I cannot explain… you sleep.”

  “This is a dream?”

  “No…”

  “Who are you, anyway?” Johann whirled around. In Algol’s now level rays, his shadow stretched behind him on the sand like a cloak extended by the wind, but there was no one there. After a moment he turned again and resumed his trudging.

  Night came long before he reached the high palisade of thorny trees. He had never, in the years before blastoff, been outdoors after sunset without being in sight of man-made light. Blackness astonished him. There was no moon; the myriad stars, which promised so much brilliance, gave none—though without them he would have thought himself blind. He stopped from time to time and searched the night sky for the ship, which should, he knew, have appeared as a winking planet moving against the background of fixed and distant suns. He could not find it.

  His hands touched the cruel spines of the first tree.

  “Friend…”

  “You’re back.”

  “I did not leave. But because you had seen me, you could not hear me. Now you cannot see, and so I can speak to you again. I can guide you through this, though it must be slowly.”

  “Where am I going?”

  There was no reply. Instead, faint pressure at the back of his left leg. He took a short step, and the pressure shifted to his right; when, later, it touched his hair, he ducked; once, when he moved too quickly, his face struck a thorny trunk, but was saved (as it seemed) by the interposition of some soft, spongy material.

  · · · ·

  He woke because Gerta, the yeoman of his own watch, was shaking him by the shoulder. “Get up,” she said. “You’re on duty. Elis is filling in for you, but you’d better get up there quick.”

  Every light in the compartment was burning brightly. His right hand was crusted with his own dark blood, and two of the fingers were swollen and sore. More obstructed than assisted by Gerta’s help, he washed his hand and swallowed two of the antibiotic capsules he had gotten from Karl.

  “All hell is going to pop on the bridge any minute,” Gerta told him. She was a big, bony girl with small eyes and a nose that seemed too short for the rest of her face.