Denis turned an angry red. “You’re disgusting!” he said sharply. “Can’t you keep a civil tongue—” lie bit off the words and made an obvious effort at conciliation.
“Why don’t you want to go home, Pettit? There’s nothing here for a man.”
“I like it,” Henry answered simply. “Grass, flowers, air—it’s a beautiful place.”
“That’s not the reason,” Denis replied nastily. His little ramrod of a back grew straighter. “I know what you’re up to in the laboratory. Forbidden research.”
“Everything was forbidden at home,” Henry answered reasonably. “But we’re not home now. It’s not forbidden here.”
“Right’s right and wrong’s wrong, no matter where—” Once more Denis controlled himself. The gold braid on his shoulders quivered with effort. “Stay here yourself if you want, then,” he snapped. “But the rest of us don’t share your peculiar tastes. We want to get back to decency, normality. Is there any reason why you shouldn’t use your influence with your scaly friends to have them send us back to Earth?”
There was—but how could he explain it to Denis? Denis had a mind which, even for the second officer of a stratosphere liner, was limited. How could Henry make him understand how horrible mental contact with Hathor was?
It was not that Hathor was malignant or even unkind. Henry had a faint but positive impression of benignity in his dealings with her. But the words with which the human mind bridges gulfs—when, who, where—became, when one was in contact with Hathor, the gulfs themselves.
To ask her when something had happened was to reel dizzily into the vastest of all enigmas for humanity—the nature of time itself. The question, “What is it?” forced the questioner to contemplate the cloudy, chilling riddle of his own personal identity. And even, “Where?” brought up a panorama of planes of being stretching out to infinity.
In between times it was not so bad. When Henry had not seen Hathor for several days he was almost able to convince himself that he was not afraid of her. Then he would need something in the laboratory, go to see her to ask for it and come back from the interview sick and shaking, swearing that nothing—nothing—would induce him to plunge once more into the vast icy reaches of her inhuman intelligence.
He hunted for a reason Denis would understand. “It’s no use asking her,” he said finally. “Vela is going to have a child now and so Hathor would never let you go.”
“But that’s just why we want to go home.”
“I know.” Henry swallowed. “But Hathor and the others look on us as—you might say—pets. Whether or not they brought us here deliberately—myself, I think it was an accident—“that’s how they feel about us. And nobody ever turned a pet loose when it was going to have young.”
There was no use in telling Denis that Hathor was responsible for Vela’s child in the same way that a dog breeder is responsible for the birth of pups. It would only offend Hardy’s dignity.
“Pets!” Denis answered, staring. “What are you talking about? They’re nothing but lizards. They haven’t got stereo, stratoliners, A-bombs, anything. We’re their superiors in every way.”
“They’re not lizards,” Henry replied. “They’re very highly evolved mammals. That crest down the back of their heads is just an accident.
“The reason they don’t have those material things is that they don’t need them. Haven’t you ever seen Hathor materialize things for my laboratory? She does it by moving her hands. She could turn a rubber ball inside out without making a hole in it.
“As far as that goes, if you think they’re nothing but lizards, why are you trying to get them to send you back to your own time and space? No lizard I ever heard of could do that sort of thing.”
Hathor appeared. One moment the air was empty—the next it thickened and condensed, and there she was. As always when he first saw her Henry was divided between a wild desire to run for cover and an almost equally strong impulse to prostrate himself in awe at her feet.
He glanced about to see how the others were taking it. Denis, for all his bravado, was turning slowly white. And Vela, trying hard to be supercilious, was arranging the folds of her mantilla with shaking hands.
Not that there was anything especially horrible about Hathor to casual viewing. Though she was over fifteen feet tall, and so strong that she could have picked up any of the humans in the park with one hand, her body was slender and well-proportioned.
She looked a good deal smaller than she actually was. The integument that covered her streamlined contours was pearly, pinkish, lustrous. And her tall vermillion crest could hardly be considered a deformity. It was something else that caused the reaction, something in the look of her eyes.
Her impersonal gaze moved slowly over the little group. It slowed and came to rest on Henry. The skies of her mind fixed on him.
“You’re Henry,” said the glassy, disembodied voice within his brain. “The one—” (not quite one—what Hathor was thinking was more like semipermeable membrane or assemblage of points) “the one with the laboratory. Yes.
“I’m going to train you—” (a dissolving kaleidoscope of images as thick as snowflakes. From the glittering throng of whirling, evanescent pictures, Henry caught up two which lasted longer than the rest—one of a hawk leaving the falconer’s wrist, the other of a slender key turning in a lock.) “Come along.” Hathor motioned with her two-thumbed hand.
It was the first time she had ever come after him. Henry felt a premonitory shudder run through his limbs. Nonetheless he got obediently to his feet.
It was nearly supper time when he got back. The smoke of Mrs. Pettit’s cooking fire drifted out into the still air and mingled pleasantly with the smell of frying meat.
Henry sank down limply on the grass beside the blaze, shielding his eyes with his hand from the light. It was not until supper had been eaten and the necessary refuse from the meal burned that he could bring himself to speak.
“Vela— Denis,” he said, trying to keep his voice from quivering, “Do you still want to get away from here? If you do I’ll do all I can to help you. I want to get away myself.”
There was a cautious silence. Vela opened her lips and then closed them again. At last Denis spoke.
“Why, yes, we still do. We thought you—Yes, we still want to get away.” For a moment the ruddy flicker of the fire lit up the tight lips of his handsome small-featured face.
Whatever had made him decide to be tactful about Henry’s abrupt volte-face, whether his silence was caused by policy or contempt, Henry was thankful for it. He could not possibly have put into words how hateful Hathor’s recent compulsory extension of his senses had made the world where he now was to him.
He had learned too much ever to consider that world beautiful again. And trying to express it verbally would have been almost as bad as the original experience.
“What was Hathor doing with you today?” Vela asked curiously.
“Training me,” Henry answered briefly. “Training you? How?”
“It’s something she does with her hands,” Henry replied unwillingly. “They disappear. And then I hear what’s going on inside the stones.”
“Oh.” Vela looked rather sick. “Well, are you just going to ask her to send us back to our Earth, or what?”
“Asking her wouldn’t be any use. She let me see that today. Anyhow, she knows we want to go home. But I’ve been thinking.” Henry Perth’s voice was getting back its customary tones. “Why do people get rid of their pets? They get rid of them—”
“I don’t like ‘get rid of’,” Denis cut in sharply. “God knows we aren’t here of our own choice and we want to get back to our own time and place. But we’re alive here and that’s something. We don’t want to get killed trying to get back.”