ve. The bald space rovers--did they still exist
here somewhere? Had they come to explore the ship built on the pattern
of their own but manned by Terrans?
"Nothing except tracks, a lot of them, in every open cabin and hole. I
think there must have been a sizable pack of the things."
"What killed the dead one?"
Buck wet his lips. "I think--fear...." His voice dropped a little,
almost apologetically, and Travis stared.
"The ship is changed. Inside, there is something wrong. When you walk
the corridors your skin crawls, you think there is something behind you.
You hear things, see things from the corners of your eyes.... When you
turn, there's nothing, nothing at all! And the higher you climb into the
ship, the worse it is. I tell you, Travis, never have I felt anything
like it before!"
"It was a ship of many dead," Travis reminded him. Had the age-old
Apache fear of the dead been activated by the Redax into an acute
phobia--to strike down such a level-headed man as Buck?
"No, at first that, too, was my thought. Then I discovered that it was
worst not near that chamber where we lay our dead, but higher, in the
Redax cabin. I think perhaps the machine is still running, but running
in a wrong way--so that it does not awaken old memories of our
ancestors now, but brings into being all the fears which have ever
haunted us through the dark of the ages. I tell you, Travis, when I came
out of that place Deklay was leading me by the hand as if I were a
child. And he was shivering as a man who will never be warm again. There
is an evil there beyond our understanding. I think that this Tatar girl,
were she only to stay there a very short time, would be well
frightened--so frightened that any trained scientist examining her later
would know there was a mystery to be explored."
"The ape-things--could they have tried to run the Redax?" Travis
wondered. To associate machines with the creatures was outwardly pure
folly. But they had been discovered on two of the planets of the old
civilization, and Ashe had thought that they might represent the
degenerate remnants of a once intelligent species.
"That is possible. If so, they raised a storm which drove them out and
killed one of them. The ship is a haunted place now."
"But for us to use the girl...." Travis had seen the logic in Buck's
first suggestion, but now he differed. If the atmosphere of the ship was
as terrifying as Buck said, to imprison Kaydessa there, even
t
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