11

… WHAT ARE YOU DOING here?" Ari had become aware of unseen eyes on her; she whirled around and met Hocking gazing at her with an unhealthy leer on his bony face. She had not heard him enter. Her father was asleep on one of the couches across the room and she thought of waking him, but decided not to.

"I have only come to see how my charges are getting along," Hocking said with oily civility. "Have you everything you need?"

"Let us go. You can't hope to gain anything by keeping us."

"Letting you go would be somewhat awkward at this point, I'm afraid. We've gone to an enormous amount of trouble to get you here. But maybe we can strike a bargain."

There was a slight whirring noise and the pneumochair slid closer. Hocking dropped his voice and his obsequious manner. "I want to talk to you. If you cooperate I might be able to help you. I have a plan."

"A plan for what?"

"For resolving this messy affair once and for all," whispered Hocking slyly. He glanced around as if to make certain no one overheard him.

"How do I know you'll live up to your part of the bargain?"

"You don't. But you'd be foolish to pass up any chance you might have to secure your freedom. I'll tell you something, Miss Zanderson. There are forces at work here that stagger the imagination-far beyond your comprehension. You are but an infinitesimal part of a design greater than men dare dream. That I am offering you a chance to save yourself should be enough for you."

As much as she distrusted the loathsome being before her, she wanted to believe there might be a way to influence him to release them.

"I don't know if I should."

"Listen, you little fool! Ortu wants you dead. You're a nuisance to him. But if you help me, I'll get you out of here safely. You have no choice… I won't ask again." Hocking glared at her fiercely. "Well?"

"All right. What do you want me to do?"

"Come with me. Now. And be quiet. Ortu has eyes all over the place."

Ari slipped after the floating chair as it flew along darkened corridors and down spiraling stone steps, deeper and deeper into the bowels of the palace. It was all she could do to keep pace with the egg gliding before her.

Finally they reached a large wooden door at the bottom of a flight of steps. Hocking paused before the door and it swung magically open before them, closing on them again once they had entered.

The room was large and dark, rank with the musty smell of age and silent as a tomb. There was a soft hum and a click, and instantly the room was washed in white light. Ari blinked and threw a hand to shield her eyes.

In a moment she lowered her arm and saw that they were in a room with stone walls at the very roots of the palace. The light came from two huge lamps set in the ceiling, but otherwise the room had no distinguishing features-save one: the enormous apparatus glinting coldly before them.

What it looked like, she could not describe. It seemed insect -like to her-as if it were a construction of nature rather than human engineering-but it had a strong, metallic appearance. The gleaming black thing stood on tall legs over a small platform with a sling chair on it. The chair she recognized as being a more or less common variety, but it was strangely out of place among the protruding knobs and convolutions of the sleek machine. Altogether, the thing had a vague, spidery appearance.

"What is it?" she asked. Her voice quavered, giving away her anxiety.

"This is merely a simple communication device-a sort of radio, you might say. It amplifies and projects brain waves. It won't bite you, my dear. I've used it myself many times. It's quite harmless, I assure you."

Ari was not assured. She liked her collaboration with the enemy less and less with every passing second.

"You're going to put me in that, aren't you?" she stated.

"I'm going to ask you to assist me, yes. That is, after all, why you came. Shall we begin?"

Hocking indicated that she was to take her place in the chair. Ari mounted the platform uncertainly and settled herself in the chair, perching on the edge of the fabric seat.

"You may as well make yourself comfortable," said Hocking as he went about readying the machine. "This will take some time." "What are you going to do?"

Hocking could not resist a smirk at her weakness. Humans, he thought, were all alike: scared children in the presence of things too vast for their puny intellectual powers. "You will not feel a thing. There will be no sensation whatever. See? We are already beginning."

Hocking lied. There was an immediate sensation, and an unpleasant one.

Ari suddenly felt dizzy, as if the room had shifted, and the feeling in her fingers-which she held clasped together in her lap-faded away. For a long moment she could not focus her eyes.

But the feeling diminished and she felt, rather than heard, a deep vibrant thrum moving up through the platform, through the chair, and into her very bones. She clamped her teeth shut to keep them from vibrating.

Two long pincerlike claws came down over her head; Ari closed her eyes so she would not have to look. When she opened them again she was bathed in a shimmering blue aura. It covered her like a gossamer gown.

The light in the room had dimmed and Hocking was nowhere to be seen. She sat motionless and gazed into the flowing light. It seemed a part of her, and she thought she had never seen anything so beautiful. It sparkled with unearthly radiance, flecked through with silver beams which burst like tiny comets as they played over her form.

She relaxed and centered her mind on the dancing light. As she did a numbness overtook her, starting at the base of her neck and working upward over her scalp. The feeling was unusual, but not unpleasant. She let it creep over her until it seemed that her head had become isolated from her body-there was no longer any connection between the two that she could feel. But at the same time this did not alarm her. She accepted it calmly and noted it somewhere in the back of her mind.

Ari's breathing slowed and she felt herself drifting. It reminded her of those last waking moments just before sleep overtook her-that delicious nether region between wakefulness and sleep when the body relaxed and the waking mind gave itself over to the subconscious.

In a moment, with eyes wide open, as if stargazing on a starfilled night, Ari began to dream.

She heard a voice nearby. It was the voice of her father and she was a little girl playing with her doll on the porch of an old house. The voice said, "Ari, where are you?"

"I'm here, Daddy," she replied. She looked around but her father was not there. She continued playing with the doll's frilly pink dress and heard again her father's call.

This time she rose from her play and looked out across a green lawn. The lawn was newly mown and smelled of cut grass. A light summer breeze blew clippings across the walk. Her father stood out on the grass and she saw him and waved to him.

"Come along, Ari. Follow me," he said. But he did not look at her. He seemed instead to look beyond her. This frightened Ari. She could not think why her father would not look at her.

"I'm coming, Daddy," she called as her short little legs scrambled down the porch steps.

Her father turned away and was walking quickly across the lawn in long strides toward a dark wood which grew near the house.

"Daddy!" the young girl cried. "Wait for me!"

The figure of her father reached the wood and stopped. He looked back and motioned her onward and then stepped in among the trees. Ari reached the place a moment later and stood outside, hesitant and frightened.

"Daddy, come out! I can't see you!" she shouted. Her tiny voice fell away among the trees.

No answer came from the dark wood. The afternoon sun stretched the shadow of the old house across the lawn and Ari drew away from it. She stepped lightly into the forest and was immediately immersed in deep blue shade and black shadow.