“I drank at the stream,” he said.
She sipped, then set the husk down. “I think he’s poisoned from the briars.” Tears ran down her face. “Max, we’ve got to do something!” What she feared most had happened, he realized; Emil was hurt and getting worse. “What should we do?” she cried, looking at him as if it was his fault, but he knew that she was blaming herself.
Max stood up. “I’ll get some more water.” He hurried away, feeling helpless.
The day became warm and humid. Hot breezes hurried through the forest all afternoon, carrying strange odors and small, flowery floaters. Max spotted large bladderthings drifting high up among the swaying branches, occasionally eating one of the flowers. One bladder-creature let out some air and seemed about to descend in pursuit of a floater, but a gust of wind swept them both away. Weak from lack of food, Max sat with Lucinda against a tree, dozing but unable to sleep. Emil lay on a bed of leaves.
“He’s dead!” Lucinda cried late in the afternoon. Max roused himself and crawled over to the motionless figure. Lucinda was crying softly as she knelt at her brother’s side.
Max leaned over and saw that the boy was breathing. “He’s alive.”
“Maybe he’ll get better,” Lucinda whispered, as if fearful of waking him. Max crawled back to the tree and tried to find some sleep.
Emil was still unconscious when Max awoke and saw stars appearing over the clearing as the yellow-white sun went down. He peered at his timer and saw that it had taken ten hours for the sun to set.
Lucinda opened her eyes suddenly, turned toward her brother’s motionless body, and cried, “We’ve got to do something!”
“Maybe he’ll be better by morning,” Max said, trying to put his arm around her.
“You know he won’t,” she answered, pushing him away.
Max remembered his father telling him about the senseless death of his friend when a quake had struck the mining town on Mercury. This made no sense, either, Max thought angrily as he looked at Lucinda.
Her eyes were wide as she stared at her brother in the twilight. “I could have kept him from going into that grass,” she said.
“It wasn’t your fault. He went ahead of us before we could notice the hooked briars, or suspect they might be deadly. Try to get some more rest, or we won’t be able to do anything.” He felt exhausted as Lucinda put her head on his shoulder.
When he awoke again, long after the alien midnight, a dim red sun had risen over the clearing. A few minutes later it was joined by a pale white sun that stayed low over the trees, casting a sickly glow into the briar-grass. Max realized that they were probably on a planet circling the bright yellow-white sun that had set, in a system that included these two, more distant stars. He moved carefully away from Lucinda, then crawled over and listened to Emil’s labored breathing.
“He’s worse, isn’t he?” she asked.
“Yes,” Max admitted as he stood up. “We’re rested enough to carry him back now. Maybe the passage has opened.”
“Moving him might hurt him even more.”
“We have no choice. You take his feet.”
They lifted him. He showed no sign of waking. Carrying him sideways, they moved through the forest. Max began to sweat. Emil let out a loud rasp as they began to climb the rocky incline below the outcropping. Max slipped on the wet moss but held his balance, gripping Emil more tightly as he and Lucinda staggered into the opening.
They hurried through the cave and entered the portal. When they neared the point where the barrier had stopped them, they put Emil down, and Max went ahead, feeling for the obstacle.
“It’s not here!” he shouted, then bumped into it. “It’s still up,” he said in despair, then slid down against it and wrapped his arms around his middle to keep from shaking. His stomach knotted as he asked himself what he was going to do. Try to keep from panicking, he supposed. Try not to let his own terrors push him and Lucinda into a panic that would destroy any chances they might have. Maybe this was what people meant when they talked about being brave— going on, staying calm, trying to survive in as reasoned a way as possible even when you were certain it would do no good.
Lucinda’s dark shape sat down next to him and said, “He’s going to die, and we’re never going to leave this place. Why is this stupid thing here? What do they want us to do?”
“I think we got lured into this by an automatic transport system,” he said. “I just don’t feel that anything alive is running it.”
“It’s going to kill us,” she said tearfully.
“If we’d been lured in for some sort of programmed purpose,” Max said, “it wouldn’t include letting us die.”
“Then the habitat got caught by it in the same way.”
“Probably.”
“Where?”
Max felt weak. “Near Earth’s Sun, maybe.”
“But we saw the Sun disappear as we came in.”
“Maybe it only looked that way. We were pulled into a station.…”
Emil began to wheeze, as if something was caught in his lungs. Max and Lucinda crawled over to him.
“Emil,” Max whispered.
The boy was struggling to say something, but Max heard only more wheezing. He touched Emil’s forehead. It was hot with fever.
“He’s worse,” Lucinda said.
They crawled back to the barrier. Its hardness felt cruel against Max’s back. He felt angry and resentful. Was there an alien turning it on and off somewhere?
Lucinda rested against him. “All we can do is wait,” he said, “until the barrier lets us through. There’s nowhere else we can go.”
“We can die here or wander around some more,” she said, “and end up even more lost.” Her body shuddered against him, but she didn’t cry. He clenched his teeth and tried to think. It seemed certain that the return to Earth had somehow started this chain of events. Why couldn’t the habitat have stayed away? From Centauri it might have gone on to another star, and then another.…
He put his arm around Lucinda as she fell asleep. He listened to her breathing for a while, then closed his eyes and surrendered to the dark.
Voices echoed through the dark passageway, as if two or more people were conversing at the entrance.
Impossible, Max told himself as he slipped back into sleep. When he heard the voices again, he felt vaguely that he was not dreaming, but still tried to ignore the sounds. The voices went on talking, and once in a while he could almost make out words. It reminded him of when he would try to hear what his parents were saying in their room. He smiled to himself, feeling superior; dreams had rarely fooled him, and this one wasn’t going to either, no matter how hard it tried to convince him it wasn’t a dream.
“Max,” Lucinda whispered.
“What?” he asked, sitting up.
She sat up next to him, and he was suddenly alert, thinking that Emil was at the exit, talking to himself in a fever.
“Do you hear voices?” Lucinda whispered.
“Yes,” Max said, staring toward the opening.
Lights flashed. Emil still lay on the floor, breathing heavily as the lights came toward them. Footsteps echoed. Aliens were marching into the tunnel, on their way through to a distant world. The barrier would come down, Max realized as he moved toward Emil.
“Pull him over,” he whispered. They grabbed Emil by the shoulders, slid him over to the wall, and huddled with him as the lights grew brighter.
“Who are they?” Lucinda whispered.
He felt her shaking next to him, and put his arm around her. Fear jolted through him as he watched the lights. These were the strangers who had built the interstellar passages, the star-people whose fault it was that Emil was dying. Anger surged through him as he stood up, unable to control himself.
“Come on!” he shouted, stepping into the center of the tunnel and facing the lights. “We’re over here! Why’d you set up your damn passages so we’d get lost in them? Who do you think you are hijacking our habitat? You don’t own the whole universe! We live in it too!” He shook, pushing the words out with his anger. “There’s more of us—billions! You my get the three of us, but the rest will hunt you down, even if you are more powerful. We’ll find you wherever you are, no matter how long it takes!”
Lucinda was tugging at his arm. “Max, what are you saying?”
The aliens probably couldn’t understand him anyway, Max thought, so his defiance was useless. He stood his ground and watched the lights, feeling helpless as they came nearer, but trying to take heart from the fact that there were billions of human beings—a whole solar system full of them—too many for the aliens to stop, he told himself. He was now glad that there were so many.
Beams of light played over his face. He glanced at Lucinda. She was kneeling by Emil, raising his head into her lap.
“Hey—it’s a bunch of kids!” a man’s voice shouted.
The intruders’ beams pointed upward, and Max saw two-legged, two-armed figures standing in front of him. He rushed at the figure directly in front of him, determined to strike a few good blows, but an appendage reached out and grasped his arm, holding him back.
“Who are you?” a man’s voice asked.
Max was unable to answer. The aliens were in his mind, using his memories to fool him into seeing and hearing human beings.
“This one’s hurt,” the man said. “Who are you?” he demanded again.
“Easy,” a second male voice said. “They may be in shock.”
“I’m Lucinda ten Eyck. This is my brother, Emil LeStrange. Please help him.”
“They’re Jake and Linda’s kids!” the second male voice cried. “Older, of course. But they went back to Earth nearly ten years ago.”
“Who’s the other boy?”
A light played over Max’s face. “He looks familiar. What’s your name, son?” The man let go of his arm.
“He’s Max Sorby,” Lucinda said.
“I knew his folks!” A light shone on the man’s face. “Max, it’s me, Lucian Russell. Lucky Russell, remember?”
Max heard the words, but couldn’t answer.
“They may be in shock,” the other man said.
“How’d you get here, Max?” Lucky asked.
“Where’s here?” Lucinda demanded.
“Centauri A-4. How did you get here?”
“It’s impossible,” the other man said.
“Got to get them out of here,” Max heard Lucky say. “This one’s out of his head.”
Suddenly it all made sense, Max realized with a jolt. The three suns…
“My brother,” Lucinda pleaded. “He was caught in some grass with hooks on the stalks. You’ve got to save him!”
“Oh, my God,” Lucky said. “He got into the grass. He’ll die if we don’t get him up to the habitat fast.”
Max tried to shake off his fear and panic. “Lucky,” he started to say, realizing that the passages had led them back to Centauri, where they had been found by a team from the new habitat. This man knew him. He was Lucky Russell, the planetary specialist.
I know him—and he isn’t an alien
, Max told himself as he passed out.
Max dimly remembered being carried out of the tunnel and through the forest to a waiting shuttle craft. He recalled the pressure of acceleration when the ship took off. Someone had spoken to him, assuring him that he would soon arrive at the Centauri habitat. He woke up in a clean bed, trying to remember what had happened.
A brown-eyed woman was smiling at him. “How do you feel, Max?” she asked.
“Better,” he said, thinking that she didn’t seem very alien, then remembering that the aliens had turned out to be human.
“You passed out from exhaustion.” She looked at him uneasily. “Max, are you up to having a visitor? Lucian Russell wants to talk to you.”
“Where are Emil and Lucinda?”
“She’s in the next room.”
“Is Emil okay?”
“We don’t know yet. We’re hoping.” She touched his cheek as she got up. “My name’s Marilyn Soong. I’m your medical doctor. I’ll come back when Dr. Russell leaves.” She was a small, slender woman with long, black hair; her body swayed gracefully as she went to the door. She paused there and smiled at him. “By the way, it is Max, and not Maxwell?”
“It’s Maxwell, but everyone calls me Max.”
“Were you named after someone in your family?”
“Dad named me after James Clerk Maxwell, because his roommate in college always kept saying that Maxwell should be as famous as Newton and Einstein. Dumb, huh, to have a first name that’s actually a last name.”
“I think it’s just fine, she said. “And it’s not always a last name.” She turned and hurried out the door.
When it slid open again, Lucian Russell came in and sat down by the bed. “Hello, Max. I’m glad you’re feeling better.” He smiled nervously. “Now, I know damn well that it’s impossible that you kids were left behind and that you were living there all these years, so can you tell me exactly how you got to be on A-4? Does it have something to do with the barrier we came upon in the passage?”
“Where’s Emil?”
Lucian Russell scratched his head, mussing his neatly combed brown hair. His gray eyes gazed steadily at Max. “We made an antitoxin to the poison from the grass, but odds are we’re too late. One of our team got scratched a while back, so we know the antitoxin works. I just hope we got to your friend in time, but—”
Max looked into Lucian Russell’s face. The man had aged a little; the lines around his eyes were deeper, and his hair was graying at the temples.
“You weren’t looking for us,” Max said.
“Just lucky, I guess.” He smiled, curling his lip. Max frowned, unable to laugh. “We were on A-4 investigating a periodic power surge we’ve been picking up. Do you know what’s going on in that tunnel?”
“Emil’s got to recover,” Max said.
Lucian Russell gave him a serious look.
“Are you sure he’s that sick?” Max asked.
He shrugged. “Let’s just hope the doctors are wrong this time.”
Max took a deep breath. “I think the power surge in the tunnel comes from the operation of an alien transport system.”
Dr. Russell listened intently as Max told the story of how their habitat had been drawn toward the Sun and into the black sphere; how the three of them had been lured out into the station one evening, where they had discovered the terminal columns and passed through several of them, emerging at different points in what seemed to be a vast interstellar network. “We had no idea this was Centauri,” Max finished, “not even when we saw the three suns.”