the entity that had been born of herrell mccray was now larger than a sun. he could see, all around him, the wonder and beauty of the great gas cloud in which his body rested, on one tiny planet of one trivial star. his sense of time was not changed from what it had been—he could count the pulses of his own body, still thudding in what, however remote, was his ear—but he could see things that were terribly slow and vast. he could see the friction of the streamers of gas in the cloud as light-pressure drove them outward. he could hear the subtle emanations of ion clashing with hurtling ion. he could see the great blue new suns tunneling through the cloud, building their strength out of the diffuse contaminated hydrogen that made the orion nebula, leaving relatively clear "holes" behind them. he could see into the gas and through it. he could perceive each star and gassy comet; and he could behold the ordered magnificence of the galaxy of stars, and the universe of galaxies, beyond.
the presence beside him was urging him to look beyond, into a denser, richer region of suns. mccray, unsure of his powers, stretched toward it—and recoiled.
there was something there which was terrifying, something cold and restless that watched him come toward it with the eyes of a crouched panther awaiting a deer.
the presence beside him felt the same terror, mccray knew. he was grateful when hatcher allowed him to look away from the central clusters and return to the immediate neighborhood of his body.
like a child's toy in a diminishing glass, mccray could see the planet he had left.
but it was no planet. it was not a planet, but a great irregular sphere of metal, honeycombed and warrened. he would have thought it a ship, though huge, if it had had engines or instruments.... no. it was a ship. hatcher beside him was proof that these creatures needed neither, not in any earthly sense, at least. they themselves were engines, with their power to move matter apart from the intervention of other matter. they themselves were instruments, through the sensing of force, that was now within his own power.
a moment's hesitant practice, and mccray had the "planet" in the palm of his hand—not a real palm, not a real hand; but it was there for his inspection. he looked at it and within it and saw the interior nests of hatcher's folk, found the room where he had been brought, traced his course to the surface, saw his own body in its spacesuit, saw beside it the flaccid suit that had held the strange woman's body....
the suit was empty.
the suit was empty, and in the moment of that discovery mccray heard a terrible wailing cry—not in his ears, in his mind—from the aliens around him. the suit was empty. they discovered it the same moment as he. it was wrong and it was dangerous; they were terrified. the companion presence beside him receded into emptiness. in a moment mccray was back in his own body, and the gathering members let him free.
