"Green light!" he whispered.
At first she seemed not to hear him. Then she touched him briefly with a vision ray.
"Devil Star," she murmured. "No. It's no use. There is something wrong. Go away."
The utter calamitousness of that order held him rigid.
"There is nothing wrong," he whispered. "I am here. I shall go with you."
Her visions wavered away. "No, there is something wrong," she repeated stubbornly. "Why should I take you anywhere?" Then, craftily, "Where is there to take you?"
He burst into the full flood of her visions. He was trembling, trying to reject what he heard, and not succeeding. Welling up from the depths of him came knowledge of the ultimate horror he was facing. Here—now—he must defeat the horror, or he was lost to it and would live with it forever.
"I shall go with you," he said in bitter frenzy. "You shall take me with you—to the forty-eighth band!"
And as soon as the words were out, he knew he should not have spoken them. Her faint thoughts came: