“Reactions,” Kepta said.

He strode on a few more limping steps. “Like now?”

A few steps more. “No,” Kepta said. “Now I know exactly what you’ll do.”

He looked at Kepta, but Kepta did not, seemingly, look his way.

“You’re limited.” Rafe asked him, the question flashing to his mind, “to one vantage point? To that shape? Those eyes?”

“No,” Kepta said again.

“Physically—where are you?”

Silence.

“Makes you nervous? You scared, are you, to answer that?”

Silence still.

They came into the dark, warted heart of the huge meeting of corridors. Light came from home-corridor at their backs, a soft glow that lit the whole floor ahead in a dim gray succession of ripples and hummocks, stalagmites and lumpish stalactites afflicted with gossamer-shrouded warts and protuberances. There were no echoes. No sound. The carpet drank it up. “Can’t afford lights here?” Rafe jibed at Kepta, trying to learn, by whatever questions Kepta would answer. “You don’t like light, that it? Or don’t you need it?”

Lights flared, illuminating a vast chamber, a craziness of lumps and hummocks and tunnels on a mammoth scale; lights died and left him in dark again, as suddenly.

Kepta was gone.

“Kepta?” He faced wildly about, flash-blinded, helpless, stumbling on the uneven floor. “Kepta?”

“First passage on your left,” a voice said, close by him. The gold-glowing image resumed. “Just checking. I’m a little narrow-focused in this shape; a great deal of me is doing other things, and now and again I like to take a little look behind the eyes, so to say. That’s right, this way. Not far now.”

His heart pounded. He rubbed at his eyes trying to get his vision back, stumbling on the uneven floor, staying with Kepta in a winding course around the prominences. They skirted around a jutting protuberance of the wall and passed one black corridor opening. The next acquired dim light, showing gray and green no different than otherwhere.

“This way,” Kepta said.

He matched Kepta’s drifting pace. The way narrowed into a twisting gut, went from gossamer-green to bald glistening plastic in a green that deepened to livid unpleasantness.

Narrower still, and brighter-lit. “O God,” Rafe said, and balked. Metal gleamed. Clusters of projections like insect limbs lined the chamber which unfurled from beyond the turning—some arms folded, some thrust out in partial extension, things to grip and bite, extensors armed with knives.

“Come on,” Kepta said. “Come ahead. That’s right. No sense running now.”

“It’s still there,” Rafe Two said. They had tried the unseen barrier now and again, when one and the other of them grew restless in their dark confinement. He went back and sat down while Jillan and Paul had their own go at it, Paul with violence, which did no good, but it satisfied some need, and Rafe averted his face and rested his chin on his arm, knee tucked up, staring into the dark beyond the invisible wall.

Now and again there were sounds. The thing that wailed had become familiar, still dreadful when it came, but it seemed by now that it would have done something, attacked if it could or if it had the desire.

“Shut up,” he told it when it came.

Paul and Jillan sat down again, Paul last; who cast himself down and hung his hands between his knees, to look up, again with a bleak, sullen stare.

He was being patient, was Paul, amnesiac, wiped of everything recent, even the remembrance that he was dead. They had had to tell him that all over again, and Paul had sat and listened, and objected. Perhaps he thought they were crazy; perhaps he believed it. Whatever Paul believed, he was quiet about it all.

Because Jillan was calm, Rafe thought; because he and Jillan accepted it and explained matters gently as they could. He detected the cracks in Paul’s facade, the little signs of tension, the occasional sharp answer, the increasingly worried look on Paul’s face when they failed to retaliate for his gibes. They were shielding him; Paul realized it. Jillan protected him—being merchanter-born, tough in spacer-ways, with a spacer’s tolerance of distances, infinities, time and thinking inside-out. She was the stronger here. So was he.

Jillan and me,Rafe thought, and Paul, on the other side, cut off from her. From me. He’s trying so hard to keep himself together in Jillan’s sight, up to her measure of a man—We joke; we seem to take it light; it’s like salt in all his wounds.

He got up, paced, for Paul’s sake, to be human. Pushed at the wall.

“Give it up,” Paul said.

He sat down again, slumped, elbows on knees.

So maybe it helped, giving Paul a way to seem calm and in control.

“Got any ideas?” he asked Paul then.

Paul was silent a long time. “Just thinking,” Paul said, “that we don’t eat, don’t sleep, don’t get tired—wonder how long it takes a mind to unravel, sitting still. Wonder if it’s listening. Or if it’s just gone off and forgotten us, this alien you met. Wonder if we’re all crazy. Or you are. And we sit here glowing in the dark.”

Rafe laughed. It was conscious effort. He remembered—a thing that turned him cold; a meeting Jillan had not known; that Paul assuredly had not; and for a moment he was the one pretending cheerfulness. It had hurt; it would happen again, he thought, for no reason, for nothing that made sense.

“Sooner or later,” he began dutifully to answer Paul; but something caught his eye, a light far out in the dark.

“Something’s out there,” Jillan said, scrambling to her feet as he did. “Something’s coming—”

It moved in that rapid way things could here. Paul got to his feet and Jillan held to him, steadying him by that contact.

It whipped up to the barrier, a human runner.

Paul.

Doppelganger’s doppelganger. It stared, stark and wide-mouthed, glowing like themselves, and with one strangled cry of grief, it spun and ran away, diminished as rapidly as it had come.

“What was that?” asked Paul, remarkably calm, considering the horror in his eyes.

Rafe turned and looked at him, far from calm himself—considered this second Paul-shape that had materialized inside the barrier with him and Jillan.

Jillan too, he remembered—the arms that had gripped him with more than human strength—

He set his back to the phantom wall, facing both of them, their united, guarded stare.

The pain—O God, the pain!

Rafe screamed while he had breath, while he had the strength. But it was too deep and too long, too thorough, pinned him between breaths and held him dying there until air began the long slow leak back into his lungs. Then the cycle ran round again.

And over again.

“There,” said Kepta’s vast slow voice after all eternity. “There. That’s over now.” And there was dark a time.

“Try to move,” it said.

Rafe moved; he would have done anything it told him, not to have the pain. He kept moving and thrust aching arms under him, took the strain of muscle-stretch across his aching ribs, his belly, trying constantly to find some position that did not hurt and discovering fresh agonies at every shift.

“Easy,” Kepta said out of that vast haze of his senses, awareness of light, machines that hummed and moved, having him as a mote in their cold heart. A metal arm moved at his face, thrust a tube into his mouth with persistent accuracy, shot a dose of tepid water down his throat. Other arms moved spiderlike about him and closed about his arms, click-click.He was past all but the vaguest fear. He let his limbs be moved because gentle as it was he had resisted once and found no limit to its strength. Click-click.It faced him about and held him upright as he sat on the table.

“Over, then?” His voice was a ragged croak, his throat raw from screaming. “Over?”

“All done,” Kepta said, taking shape in front of him. “Rest a bit.”