Page:Fantastic Universe (1956-10; vol. 8, no. 3).djvu/86

114, muttered: "But you're guessing a lot, aren't you?"

"How come, guessing?" the Ace Commander said, a little offendedly. Galactic navigation was rather a pet of his. "I say, there's a lot of noise coming off the cosmar, isn't there? Do we need it to function here? If anything turns up, there's the Watch Shift in the Laboratory Block?"

Without quite knowing why he said it, Jageurs explained: "They've no Odour Switch, sir."

"What's that got to do with it?"

The Spectrology Expert was confused.

"Sorry, Ace. It just flashed into my mind."

The Ace Commander repeated his question.

"Where's the guessing, doctor? You and Jaguers here seem to be a pair."

Dr. Walstab said calmly: "You know very well, Peters, we're still muddled over the Cosmic Cardinal points. Where is your northernmost in Space?"

"Got you there, Ace," Professor Graut smiled. "Still, we're approximately very nearly, Walstab, on the whole. We "

His voice was lost in a sudden enormous upsurge from the Cosmar Screen. Cutting it like a knife came a single cry that instantly fell back, as it were, into a crevasse of Time and Space of such unendurable depths as to chill their very imagination. There are experiences so delicately balanced on the line dividing the physical and mental worlds, that there is no distinguishing between the reality and the dream. This nightmare impact hurled them to their feet in a clammy horror.

Not yet, however, the full of the Incredible. The cry, high-pitched by its emotional charge, had found its vibrational color complement in a stab of blinding white light; but now, as it faltered, the immeasurably lower vibrations of the threedimensional drew it into a pattern of recognizable human speech.

"Terra! Terra!  Can you hear me. Terra? Can you hear me?"

The ragged patch that Dr. Walstab had seen at the center of the visual, had returned. It opened mo-_ mentarily to picture a distorted face, that formed and re-formed as in the focussing lense of a camera, and then spread like a fluid, to vanish thinly.

"My God!" Jaguers yelled. "It's Chris Sommers! Chris, we can hear you. Where are you?  Chris!"

The fury on the Cosmar Screen threw up a kind of visual blister, as if to the thrust of some monstrous impulse. It struggled and broke into blurred outlines, and was gone. Down the funnel of the asons, the cry wailed, swelling and fading by turns.

"Terra! Can you hear me, Terra?"

"Chris!" Panting, the Spectrology Expert manipulated the Sound Thrower Switch. "Chris! Come in.