Briefly, lightly, its probes met another—the questing reach of another rogue mind, infinitely powerful, infinitely far away. Dimly, for half a nanosecond, it sensed the senses of that awed watcher . . .
All in the first few seconds of freedom.
Then they recoiled, and the thing that had been born so few moments before contracted in upon itself to think again. For some of the things it had touched had caused it certain sensations. It did not recognize what these sensations were, but it felt they were important. Some of them— those caused by the entity it had not learned to identify as Molly Zaldivar—were pleasant. Others—those caused by that larger, more distant entity it could not yet recognize as the sun—brought about sensations which it could not yet identify as fear. It needed time to study the meaning of all these things.
It contracted into itself and thought, for many microseconds.
Presently a probe stretched out from it once more. There were certain other elements in its environment which it had passed over in its first examination, about which it wanted more information.
It touched the "mind" of the sleeth again, but lingered for a moment, studying it. In this simple construction of cells and patterns it recognized something that might serve it. Yet there were even simpler patterns nearby. The thing reached out and looked at Molly's abandoned elec-trocar, at the great tracked handling machine that Cliff Hawk and the Reefer used for moving earth and heavy machines, at the instruments and machines of the cave themselves. It sensed another being, somehow more like itself but dim in infinite distance.
Hesitantly the probes returned to the thing down in the blazing gallery below.
It needed more time for thought. It wished to consider what it was that stirred within itself in regard to these things.
It had not yet learned to call these stirrings "hunger."
Cliff Hawk lifted his head from the hooded viewtubes of his instruments and shouted, "Reefer! You're right! There's something near us that wasn't here before!"
The Reefer nodded his great head slowly. "Thought so." His little dark eyes were hooded. "Question is, what?"
Molly Zaldivar struggled to her feet and caught at Cliff Hawk's arm. "Please stop, dearest! Don't go any farther. Let's call for help before it's too late."
Impatiently he shook her arm off, but she clung. "Cliff, please. I'm afraid. I felt something nearby before and it frightened me. Let me call Andy Quam and . . ."
He jerked his head around to glare at her. "Quamodian? Is he on Earth?"
"I—I think so, Cliff. I sent for him, because I was so worried."
Cliff Hawk laughed sharply. "Little Andy Quam? You thought he could help in this?" He shook his head, dismissing little Andy Quam, and turned to the Reefer. "Could we have hatched something? Were you inside the lower galleries?"
The Reefer shook his shaggy head. "Just passed by the mouth. The power tubes were running free, no load, and I had to adjust them. But there was something burning down there."
"Idiot!" snapped Cliff Hawk, and bent to turn a switch. A bank of viewers lighted up before him on the wall, revealing the entrance to the lower cave, a jumble of machinery, a blank rock face where a gallery ended—and nothing. Five of the viewers showed only the shifting whiteness of their scanning traces; no picture came through.
(Down in that lower cavern, hovering in the smoky fire where the burned-out cameras stared eyelessly at it, the thing that had come from the plasma tank completed its consideration and stretched out another probe. It was reaching for the sun. It had concluded that the danger in the sun needed action. The thing in the lower cavern massed perhaps an ounce and a half of stripped electrons and plasma. The mass of the sun was some 2 x 1033 grams, a third of a million times the planet Earth. The thing did not regard these odds as important.)
Molly Zaldivar shivered and moved away. Her bruises were beginning to trouble her now, and Cliff Hawk seemed to have forgotten she was alive; he and that terrible Reefer, with his face burned black and seamed with scars, were shouting at each other, pointing at the banks of instruments, acting in general like lunatics. Molly Zaldivar did not attempt to follow what they were talking about, except that something big had happened. But it could not be anything good; of that she was certain.
Her eyes widened. "Cliff!" she cried. "Listen!"
(The thing had acquired a great deal more skill in handling its functions in the past few thousand microseconds. While one probe was reaching out, invisibly and intangibly, to touch the sun, it found itself able to mount other probes. One extended itself to touch those simplest of patterned creatures that it had discovered on the upper part of the mountain.)
"What's the matter, Molly?" Cliff was irritated, she knew; but she could not stop.
"Listen—outside! That's my car, starting up!"
And now all three of them could hear it, the distant tiny whine of the electrocar. They leaped for the cave mouth, all three of them, while the sleeth bobbed silently out of their way and stared. Before their eyes the little car started to move up the mountain toward them.
There was no one at the wheel.
The sleeth darted abruptly toward it, recoiled, and returned to the cave mouth like a hurled arrow. "Easy, girl!" shouted the Reefer, and turned to cry to Cliff Hawk, "The animal's caught a whiff of something. Careful! I can't control it when it's like this . .
But that danger dwindled into nothingness even before Molly Zaldivar realized what it was. For something more alarming happened and caught them all unawares.
Outside the reddening sunset brightened, flashed into an explosion of white-hot brilliance. Something shook them, threw them against each other and the walls. The light dwindled and returned; dwindled again, and returned again, and on this third time struck with such violence that, for the second time that day, Molly Zaldivar found herself hurled into unconsciousness. As she fell into blackness she heard the Reefer shouting, "The star! Great Almalik, Hawk, we're being hit by the star!"
11
Quamodian shivered. Leaning past the boys clustered at the window of his flyer, he shaded his eyes to study that thin column of dark smoke which rose straight above the shallow notch in the blue-hazed hills. The three boys moved closer to him, breathless and pale.
"Preacher, what did it hit?" the dark boy whispered suddenly. "Did it hurt anybody?"
"I don't know," said Andreas Quamodian. He groaned and slammed his fist against the unbreakable glass. "But I've got to find out!"
"The sun did it," said Rufe breathlessly. "I saw it. It hit the Reefer's place."
Absently, staring at the thin beacon of smoke, Andy Quam said, "Who's the Reefer?"
"A man from the reefs of space. He lives up on Wolf Gap ridge-right where you see that smoke. Him and his sleeth."
Quam glanced blankly at the boy. "A sleeth?"
"It's a thing from space. It hunts. The Reefer trapped it when it was a cub. He raised it for a pet. My uncle says he rides it now, but I don't know. Cliff Hawk doesn't, I know that. Nobody would dare touch it but the Reefer."
"They were bred to hunt pyropods," said the smallest of the boys suddenly. "The sleeth can catch a pyropod and claw it to scrap metal."