Hilton shook his fair head. “It’s weak now. It won’t think about us until it has fed. Perhaps two hours more.”
“Can you read its thoughts?” demanded Falken sourly.
“A very little,” said Hilton, and Sheila laughed, quietly.
Hilton worked feverishly. Falken watched his deft fingers weaving a bewildering web of wires between the three helmets, watched him shift and change, tune and adjust. He watched the sun-child throb and sparkle as the strength of the Sun sank into it. He watched Sheila Moore, staring at Hilton with eyes of brilliant green.
He never knew how much time passed. Only that the Sun-child gave a little rippling sigh of light and floated down. The fissure closed above it. Sheila caught her breath, sharp between her teeth.
Hilton rose. He said rapidly.
“I’ve done the best I can. It’s crude, but the batteries are strong. The helmets will pick up and amplify the energy-impulses of our brains. We’ll broadcast a single negative impulse, opposed to every desire the Sun-thing has.
“Stay close together, because if the wires are broken between the helmets we lose power, and it’s going to take all the strength we have to beat that creature.”
Falken put on his helmet. Little copper discs, cut from the sheet in the repair kit and soldered to wires with Hilton’s blaster, fitted to his temples. Through the vision ports he could see the web of wires that ran from the three helmets through a maze of spare grids and a condenser, and then into the slender shaft of a crude directional antenna.
Hilton said, “Concentrate on the single negative, No .”
Falken looked at the lovely shimmering cloud, coming toward them.
“It won’t be easy,” he said grimly, “to concentrate.”
Sheila’s eyes were savage and feral, watching that foam of living flame. Hilton’s face was hidden. He said,
“Switch on your radios.”
Power hummed from the batteries. Falken felt a queer tingle in his brain.
The Sun-child hovered over them. Its mind-voice was silent, and Falken knew that the electrical current in his helmet was blanking his own thoughts.
They linked arms. Falken set his brain to beating out an impulse, like a radio signal, opposing the negative of his mind to the positive of the Sun-child’s.
*
Falken stood with the others on spongy, yielding soil. Dim plant-shapes rose on all sides as far as he could see, forming an impenetrable tangle of queer geometric shapes that made him reel with a sense of spatial distortion.
Overhead, in a sea-green sky, three tiny suns wheeled in mad orbits about a common center. There was a smell in the air, a rotting stench that was neither animal or vegetable.
Falken stood still, pouring all his strength into that single mental command to stop.
The tangled geometric trees wavered momentarily. Dizzily, through the wheeling triple suns, the Sun-child showed, stabbed through with puzzled, angry scarlet.
The landscape steadied again. And the ground began to move.
It crawled in small hungry wavelets about Falken’s feet. The musky, rotten smell was heavy as oil. Sheila and Hilton seemed distant and unreal, their faces hidden in the helmets.
Falken gripped them together and drove his brain to its task. He knew what this was. The reproduction of another world, remembered from the Sun-child’s youth. If they could only stand still, and not think about it....
He felt the earth lurch upward, and guessed that the Sun-child had raised its creation off the floor of the cavern.
The earth began to coil away from under his feet.
*
For a giddy instant Falken saw the true world far below, and the Sun-child floating in rainbow light.
It was angry. He could tell that from its color. Then suddenly the anger was drowned in a swirl of golden motes.
It was laughing. The Sun-child was laughing.
Falken fought down a sharp despair. A terrible fear of falling oppressed him. He heard Sheila scream. The world closed in again.
Sheila Moore looked at him from between two writhing trees.
He hadn’t felt her go. But she was there. Hairy branches coiled around her, tore her vac-suit. She shrieked....
Falken cried out and went forward. Something held him. He fought it off, driven by the agony in Sheila’s cry.
Something snapped thinly. There was a flaring shock inside his helmet. He fell, and staggered up and on, and the hungry branches whipped away from the girl.
She stood there, her thin white body showing through the torn vac-suit, and laughed at him.
He saw Miner Hilton crawling dazed on the living ground, toward the thing that looked like Sheila and laughed with mocking golden motes in its eyes.
A vast darkness settled on Falken’s soul. He turned. Sheila Moore crouched where he had thrown her from him, in his struggle to help the lying shell among the trees.
He went and picked her up. He said to Miner Hilton,
“Can we fix these broken wires?”
Hilton shook his head. The shock of the breaking seemed to have steadied him a little. “No,” he said. “Too much burned out.”
“Then we’re beaten.” Falken turned a bitter, snarling face to the green sky, raised one futile fist and shook it. Then he was silent, looking at the others.
Sheila Moore said softly, “This is the end, isn’t it?”
Falken nodded. And Miner Hilton said,
“I’m not afraid, now.” He looked at the trees that hung over them, waiting, and shook his head. “I don’t understand. Now that I know I’m going to die, I’m not afraid.”
Sheila’s green eyes were soft and misty. She kissed Hilton, slowly and tenderly, on the lips.
Falken turned his back and stared at the twisted ugly trees. He didn’t see them. And he wasn’t thinking of the Unregenerates and the world he’d won and then lost.
*
Sheila’s hand touched him. She whispered, “Eric....”
Her eyes were deep, glorious green. Her pale starved face had the brittle beauty of wind-carved snow. She held up her arms and smiled.
Falken took her and buried his gypsy face in the raw gold of her hair.
“How did you know?” he whispered. “How did you know I loved you?”
“I just—knew.”
“And Hilton?”
“He doesn’t love me, Eric. He loves what I stand for. And anyway...I can say this now, because we’re going to die. I’ve loved you since I first saw you. I love you more than Tom, and I’d have died for him.”
Hungry tree branches reached for them, barely too short. Buds were shooting up underfoot. But Falken forgot them, the alien life and the wheeling suns that were only a monstrous dream, and the Sun-child who dreamed them.
For that single instant he was happy, as he had not been since Kitty was lost.
Presently he turned and smiled at Hilton, and the wolf look was gone from his face. Hilton said quietly.
“Maybe she’s right, about me. I don’t know. There’s so much I don’t know. I’m sorry I’m not going to live to find out.”
“We’re all sorry,” said Falken, “about not living.” A sudden sharp flare lighted