He laughed then in his madness.
He laughed and stopped abruptly, grasping for the threads of sanity and pulling them together. He was standing in a light gravity patch and things suddenly looked as normal as they could on Roth.
He glanced through a patch in the mist and saw Mary standing there. He ran towards her.
'Mary!'
'Asquiol!'
The woman was Willow Kovacs in a suit - Mary's old suit. He made as if to strike her down, but the look of disappointment on her face stopped him. He pushed past her, changed his mind, came back.
'Willow - Mary's here, I know…' Suddenly he realised the possible truth. 'My God, of course. Time's so twisted and warped we could be seeing anything that's happened at any time in the past - or the future!'
Another figure came stumbling out of the light-mist. It was Talfryn.
'I couldn't contact you from the ship. There's a woman there. She…'
'It's an illusion, man. Get back to the ship!'
'You come with me. It's no illusion. She entered the ship herself!'
'Lead the way back,' Roffrey said. Willow remained where she was, refusing to budge. At length they had to lift her, squirming, and carry her back. It was only three yards away.
The woman wore a space suit. She was lying on the floor of the cabin. Roffrey bent over her, lifting the faceplate.
'Mary,' he said, softly. 'Mary - thank God!'
The eyes opened, the big soft eyes that had once held intelligence. For a short time intelligence was there - a look of incredible awareness. Then it faded and she formed her lips to say something, but they twisted downwards into an idiot grin and she subsided into a blank-eyed daze.
He got up wearily, his body bowed. He made a gesture with his left hand. 'Willow, help her out of the suit. We'll get her into a bunk.'
Willow looked at him with hatred: 'Asquiol's out there… You stopped me.'
Talfryn said: 'Even if he was he wouldn't want you. You keep pining for him, wishing you'd followed him earlier. Now it's too late. It's no good, Willow, you've lost him for ever!'
'Once he sees me he'll take me back. He loved me!'
Roffrey said impatiently to Talfryn: 'You'd better help me, then.'
Talfryn nodded. They began getting her out of the suit.
'Willow,' said Roffrey as they worked, 'Asquiol wasn't there - not now. You saw something that probably happened years ago. The other man was Renark - and Renark's dead? You understand?'
'I saw him. He heard me call him!'
'Maybe. I don't know. Don't worry Willow. We're going back to the fleet if we can - if it still exists. You'll see him then.'
Talfryn wrenched off a piece of space-armour from Mary's body with a savage movement. His teeth were clenched but he said nothing.
'You're going back to the fleet? But you said…' Willow was disconcerted. Roffrey noted a peculiar look, a mixture of eagerness and introspection.
'Mary needs treatment. The only place she'll get it is back there. So that's where I'm going. That should suit you.'
'It does,' she said. 'Yes, it does.'
He went over to the ports and closed their shutters so they couldn't see Roth's surface. It felt a little safer.
Talfryn said suddenly: 'I get it, Willow. You've made it plain. I won't be bothering you from now on.'
'You'd better not.' She turned on Roffrey: 'And that goes for you, too, for any man. I'm Asquiol's woman, as you'll see when we get back to the fleet!'
'Don't worry,' he grinned. 'You're not my type.'
She pushed back her lank hair, piqued. 'Thanks,' she said.
Roffrey smiled at Mary, who sat drooling and crooning in her bunk. He winked at her. 'You're my type, Mary,' he said genially.
'That's cruel,' Willow said sharply.
'That's my wife.' Roffrey smiled, and then Willow saw at least a trace of what the smiling eyes and grin hid.
She turned away.
'Let's get going,' said Roffrey briskly. Now that he had made up his mind, he wanted to waste no time returning to the fleet.
He couldn't guess how long Mary had been on Roth. Maybe only a few minutes of real time. Maybe a hundred years of Roth's time. He did not allow himself to dwell on this, just as he refused to consider the extent of her mental derangement. The psychiatrists in the fleet might soon be supplying him with all the information they possibly could. He was prepared to wait and see.
He went over to her. She shrank away from him, muttering and crooning, her big eyes wider than ever. Very gently he made her lie down in the bunk and strapped her into it with safety harness. It pained him that she didn't recognise him, but he was still smiling and humming a little tune to himself as he climbed into the pilot's seat, heaved back a lever, adjusted a couple of dials, flipped a series of switches and soon the drone of the drive was drowning his own humming.
Then, in a flicker, they were off into deep space and heading away from the Sundered Worlds into the depths of matterless void. It was such an easy lift-off, Roffrey felt, that it was almost as if a friendly hand had given them a push from behind…
It was with a sense of inevitability that he began the descent through the dimension layers, heading back to the space-time in which he'd left the fleet of mankind.
Meanwhile, men's brains were jarred and jumbled as they strove to master the Game. Minds broke. Nerves snapped. But, while scarcely understanding what it was about, Lord Mordan forced his team to continue, convinced that humanity's chance of survival depended on winning…
Whistling sounds were the first impressions Roffrey received as he phased the ship out of the Shifter's space-time and into the next level.
Space around them suddenly became bright with stars, the not-quite-familiar whirl of a spiral galaxy searing outwards in a wild sprawl of suns. But the whistle was replaced by a dreadful moaning which pervaded the ship and made speech impossible.
Roffrey was intent on the new instruments. The little experience he had of the continuum-travelling device had shown him that the ship could easily slip back through the space-time layers and become totally lost.
The instruments hadn't been designed for wide travelling of this kind and Roffrey knew it, but each separate universe in the multiverse had its particular co-ordinates, and the instruments, crude as they were, could differentiate between them. Over the main laser screen Roffrey had a chart which would enable him to recognise the universe into which the human race had fled. But the journey could be dangerous, perhaps impossible.
And then the noise increased to become painful, no longer a monotone but a pulsating, nerve-racking whine. Roffrey phased into the next layer.
The galaxy ahead was a seething inferno of unformed matter, hazy, bright, full of archetypal colour - reds, whites, blacks, yellows - pouring about in slow disorder. This was a universe in a state of either birth or dissolution.
There was near-silence as Roffrey phased out of this continuum and into the next. His whistling, which he had been doing all the while, was light and cheerful. Then he heard Mary's groans and he stopped.
Now they were in the centre of a galaxy.
Massed stars lay in all directions. He stared at them in wonder, noticing how, with every phase, the matter, filling the space around them seemed to change its position as well as its nature.
Then the stars were gone and he was passing through a turbulent mass of dark gas which seemed to form into horrible half-recognisable shapes which sickened him so that he could no longer look but had to concentrate on his instruments.
What he read there depressed and shocked him!
He was off course.
He chewed at his moustache, debating what to do. He didn't mention it to the others. The co-ordinates corresponded to those on the chart above the screen.
As far as the ship's instruments were concerned, they were in the space-time occupied by Asquiol and the fleet I