"Holcomb!" My voice filled the plexiglas bubble of my helmet. I was afraid the youngster was going to say the very thing I had been thinking a few moments before and I didn't want to hear it.
The physicist subsided for a minute, and Swanson cut in. "Mars shows properly in the course-scope now, Captain! Way off to one side!"
Holcomb's laugh made cold chills run up and down my backbone. "She doesn't care now!" he bubbled. "She doesn't care if we know now ... because we can't control her! She ... She's going home ... and we can't stop her!"
I dove through the blister hatch and ran down the ramp toward the metering station shouting for Swanson to get into a suit and join me there. Fear followed me like a writhing black shade down the dark companionways. I was afraid for Holcomb's mind, and I was afraid of something else. Something that had no name or shape. I was afraid of Clem ... of the thing I knew for certain now she had become.
When I reached Holcomb he was calm. His outburst seemed to have sobered him, and for that, at least, I could be thankful.
We waited for Swanson to join us, and then we went into the shaft. Soberly, we stood near the pile, feeling the strangeness of the alien life that lived as hellish atomic fire in the shielded tube nearby. We could feel a probing in our minds, alien fingers fishing about curiously, but with cautious reserve of ... a precocious child.
It was Swanson who put it into words finally. Simple, prosaic words. "The blinkin' can has come alive!" he muttered. That tore it. Swanson hadn't an imaginative bone in his body, and if he felt it ... it was.
My mind flashed back across the years to the old man of the Mojave yards and his stories about living ships. The living thing that was the Sun, the thing that had given birth to Clem's soul had gleamed in on that soul through the break in the plates, and in doing that it had posed on Clem awareness. Awareness that she was part of the mighty life stream of the cosmos ... part of the living fires of the stars. In a way that human minds could but dimly grasp, the Sun had spoken to Clem ... called her. And this was the result....
Understand ... there was nothing malign about her ... not just then. She was almost childlike. Pure, brilliant, willful....
We jerry-rigged a control set right there in that shaft, hoping to cut across the linkages from the top deck; but it was futile. I had the insane notion that she was laughing at us and our pestering efforts to re-establish dominance over her.