Maclaren rose with him. The floodlamps ridged both their faces against the huge hollow dark. Maclaren caught Ryerson’s eyes with his own. For a moment they struggled, not moving under theconstellations, but sweat sprang out upon Ryerson’s forehead.

“You realize,” said Maclaren, “that we actually can eat for quite a while longer. I’d say, at a guess, two more months.”

“No,” whispered Ryerson. “No, I won’t.”

“You will,” Maclaren told him.

He stood there another minute, to make certain of his victory, which he meant as a gift to Tamara. Then he turned on his heel and walked over to the machine. “Come on,” he said, “let’s get to work.”

Maclaren woke up of himself. For a moment he did not remember where he was. He had been in some place of trees, where water flashed bright beneath a hill. Someone had been with him, but her name and face would not come back. There was a lingering warmth on his lips.

He blinked at the table fastened to the ceiling. He was lying on a mattress — Yes. The Southern Cross, a chilly knowledge. But why had he wakened early? Sleep was the last hiding place left to him and Dave. They stood watch and watch at the web controls, and came back to their upside-down bunkroom and ate sleep. Life had shrunken to that.

Maclaren yawned and rolled over. The alarm clock caught his eye. Had the stupid thing stopped? He looked at the second hand for a while, decided that it was indeed moving. But then he had slept for holy shark-toothed sea gods, for thirteen hours!

He sat up with a gasp. Bloodlessness went through his head. He clung to his blankets and waited for strength to come back. How long a time had it been, while his tissues consumed themselves for lack of all other nourishment? He had stopped counting hours. But the ribs and joints stuck out on him so he sometimes listened for a rattle when he walked. Had it been a month? At least it was a time spent inboard, with little physical exertion; that fact alone kept him alive.

Slowly, like a sick creature, he climbed to his feet. If Dave hadn’t called him, Dave might have passed out, or died, or proven to have been only a starving man’s whim. With a host of furious fancies — Maclaren shambled across to the shaftway. The transceiver rooms were aft of the gyros, they had been meant to be “down” with respect to the observation deck whenever there was acceleration and now they were up above. Fortunately, the ship had been designed in the knowledge she would be in free fall most of her life. Maclaren gripped a rung with both hands. I could use a little free fall right now, he reflected through the dizziness. He put one foot on the next rung, used that leg and both hands to pull the next foot up beside it; now, repeat; once more; one for Father and one for Mother and one for Nurse and one for the cat and so it goes until here we are, shaking with exhaustion.

Ryerson sat at the control panel outside the receiving and transmitting chambers. It had been necessary to spotweld a chair, with attached ladder, to the wall and, of course, learn how to operate an upside-down control panel. The face that turned toward Maclaren was bleached and hairy and caved-in; but the voice seemed almost cheerful. “So you’re awake.”

“The alarm didn’t call me,” said Maclaren. He panted for air. “Why didn’t you come rouse me?”

“Because I turned off the alarm in the first place.”

“What?” Maclaren sat down on what had been the ceiling and stared upward.

“You’ll fall apart if you don’t get more rest,” said Ryerson. “You’ve been in worse shape than me for weeks, even before the… the food gave out. I can sit here and twiddle knobs without having to break off every eight hours.”

“Well, maybe.” Maclaren felt too tired to argue.

“Any luck?” he asked after a while.

“Not yet. I’m trying a new sequence now. Don’t worry, we’re bound to hit resonance soon.”

Maclaren considered the problem for a while. Lately his mind seemed to have lost as much ability to hold things as his fingers. Painfully, he reconstructed the theory and practice of gravitic mattercasting. Everything followed with simple logic from the fact that it was possible at all.

The signals necessarily used a pulse code, with amplitude and duration as the variables; there were tricky ways to include a little more information through the number of pulses per millisecond, if you set an upper limit to the duration of each. It all took place so rapidly that engineers could speak in wave terms without too gross an approximation. Each transceiver identified itself by a “carrier” pattern, of which the actual mattercasting signal was a modulation. The process only took place if contact had been established, that is, if the transmitter was emitting the carrier pattern of a functioning receiver: the “resonance” or “awareness” effect which beat the inverse-square law, a development of Einstein’s great truth that the entire cosmos is shaped by what momentarily happens to each of its material parts.

The ’caster itself, by the very act of scanning, generated the signals which recreated the object transmitted. But first the ‘caster must be tuned in on the desired receiving station. The manual aboard ship gave the call pattern of every established transceiver: but, naturally, gave it in terms of the standardized and tested web originally built into the ship. Thus, to reach Sol, the book said, blend its pattern with that of Rashid’s Star, the initial relay station in this particular case. Your signal will be automatically bucked on, through several worlds, till it reaches Earth’s Moon. Here are the respective voltages, oscillator frequencies, et cetera, involved; add them up and use the resultant.

Ryerson’s handmade web was not standardized. He could put a known pattern into it, electronically, but the gravitics would emit an unknown one, the call signal of a station not to be built for the next thousand years. He lacked instruments to measure the relationship, so he could not recalculate the appropriate settings. It was cut and try, with a literal infinity of choices and only a few jackleg estimates to rule out some of the possibilities.

Maclaren sighed. A long time had passed while he sat thinking. Or so his watch claimed. He hadn’t noticed it go by, himself.

“You know something, Dave?” he said.

“Hm-m-m?” Ryerson turned a knob, slid a vernier one notch, and punched along a row of buttons.

“We are out on the far edge of no place. I forgot how far to the nearest station, but a devil of a long ways. This haywire rig of ours may not have the power to reach it.”

“I knew that all the time,” said Ryerson. He slapped the main switch. Needles wavered on dials, oscilloscope tracings glowed elthill green, it whined in the air. “I think our apparatus is husky enough, though. Remember, this ship has left Sol farther behind than any other ever did. They knew she would — a straight-line course would just naturally outrun the three-dimensional expansion of our territory — so they built the transceiver with capacity to spare. Even in its present battered state, it might reach Sol directly, if conditions were just right.”

“Think we will? That would be fun.”

Ryerson shrugged. “I doubt it, frankly. Just on a statistical basis. There are so many other stations by now — Hey!”

Maclaren found himself on his feet, shaking. “What is it?” he got out. “What is it? For the love of heaven, Dave, what is it?”

Ryerson’s mouth opened and closed, but no sounds emerged. He pointed with one bony arm. It shook.

Below him — it was meant to be above, like a star — a light glowed red.

“Contact,” said Maclaren.

The word echoed through his skull as if spoken by a creator, across a universe still black and empty.