PATTERN

Rahll floated, a dim pattern of electrical impulse in the void of space. He was vaguely aware that he was dying into nothingness, and that in a short time he would be a meaningless mass of aimless patterning, with no consciousness and no unity. But there was nothing that could be done about it; his flexible impulse had woven itself into millions upon millions of varying thought-forms, and no solution to his situation had presented itself.

His impulse writhed into remembrance of the Great Pattern of countless centuries before. There had been thousands of impulses similar to himself, all banded together into one huge, unified Form, standing in this wasteland of space; thousands of impulses, all twisting in the shaping and reshaping of their own thoughts and emotions, but all connected by the central Great Pattern so that they stood, impulse to impulse, in a huge, delicately crystal-like structure of electricity.

And they had given each other life, replenishing their powers within themselves, and existing in the contentment of peace, for millennium upon millennium.

Until the Cataclysm. There had been some impulses who tired of the old pattern of unification, and wished to form a new one; however, they were opposed by other, more content impulses, who stubbornly held to the old pattern. The rebels, as they were called, formed their carefully planned new pattern in spite of the opposition; the result being that the two different patterns intertwined each other, fell into antagonizing frequencies, and blew the community apart.

Only Rahll's delicate impulse had escaped this Cataclysm. He had been badly wounded, unable to move in any direction; so for thousands of years after the explosion he had floated in darkness, waiting for a sign of another impulse with which to make contact and create mutual sustenance. But no sign had come, and Rahll's shape had slowly become warped with weakness and hunger into the jagged form of a pattern which had never been seen in the old community.

The pattern of a cannibal. The only central thought-form which activated him now was to Find Impulse and to Absorb Impulse; to absorb flexible impulse into his wavering frame and twist it to his own form, so he would live, so he could exist for a while longer, so he could branch out and find more flexible impulse to eat and twist to his pattern.

But the long process of disintegration was now almost at an end; he could reshape his thought-patterns only with the greatest pain and difficulty, and branching out was out of the question. He realized this, and slowly prepared himself for the final pattern to come; the pattern of death.

As his faint, blue shape of line-impulse reformed within itself, however, he became conscious of a weak, almost nonexistent impulse beating against the outer fringe of his pattern. He stopped his reforming process and, summoning all the power he could, glided toward the impulse.

When he did this, the impulse became definitely stronger; slowly his delicate, crystalloid form became more and more conscious of it; its power rose and rose, until it reached an almost unbearable intensity.

Waves of hunger beat against Rahll, as they had for centuries; but here, here at last, was satisfaction. His jagged cannibal's pattern roused itself, waiting for the new impulse to come within striking distance. And then....

It stopped. It had been there for only a moment, and now it was gone. Rahll desperately sent out tendrils of a length he had thought he would never attain again in search of the huge impulse, and found....

Another. This one was smaller, although still one hundred times as powerful as Rahll's; and, oddly, it was channelled into five separate spokes of impulse which functioned around a large central hub-impulse. The impulses in the five channels were exactly alike, but they were interpreted differently by the central hub due to the different channels through which they came. Rahll sorted and distinguished these five interpretations, his pattern weaving into one of curiosity and vague dismay as he did.

One channel of impulse was evidently devoted to the sensing of forms and colors, something which Rahll found unnecessary; a second was one which sensed vibrations in—in something, a substance Rahll was unfamiliar with, one with more substance than the void he lived in and yet unsolid enough to carry vibrations easily; a third existed to sense odors in this unsolid substance; a fourth to sense some things which Rahll did not recognize, bitter, salt, sweet, and sour; and a fifth to sense heat and cold. All these impulses transmitted their sensings to the central hub, which seemed to be a completely flexible mass of unpatterned, vari-frequencied electrical impulses that was almost overpoweringly strong.

Yes, these were food for Rahll; but two factors held him from consuming all six branches of impulse together.

The first was that he was so weak that any more than one of the spoke-impulses absorbed at a time would have shattered his frail form.

The second was that this collective impulse operated on a frequency altogether different from Rahll's. Try as he might, Rahll could not emulate this frequency; it was too alien, too far removed from his own, and he was too weak. But this impulse's frequency was flexible; if he could make it become harmonious with his own frequency, then he could easily absorb it, branch by branch.

It would be a relatively simple matter to make the impulse harmonize with him, Rahll knew; all he had to do was make the flexible-frequencied impulse accept his own impulse as something un-alien and natural, by taking a form the impulse would not suspect; something which blended with the impulse's environment. As soon as a branch of the alien impulse accepted Rahll's own impulse as natural, Rahll would move blocks into the channels of that branch and absorb it.

First he examined the branch devoted to sensing odors. Yes, it would be child's play to cause an impulse to transmit through the odor channels to the central hub, where it would be interpreted as an odor....

Brenner sat hunched over the controls of the spaceship. Damm! How had he gotten so far away from Base? There weren't any planets here for millions of miles in all directions; only blackness. He couldn't make connection with Base; he couldn't make connection with anything.

His small, three-compartmented ship sped swiftly along toward nothing. In the tail compartment, the atomic and the electrical generators hummed serenely; in the nose compartment, Brenner continued to curse.

Something in the mechanism of his directional equipment was fouled up. That must be it. He decided to cut power and think for a while.

He closed off the atomic generator, stopping the rockets, and, as an afterthought, shut off the electrical generator also. Sitting in the darkness, he tried vainly to make out some light in the void beyond the nose observation window. But he could see nothing. No stars, no planets. Nothing at all. Base had been built in deep space; all light from other suns was cut off here by time and distance.

He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. Hale at Base was probably tearing his hair out. Brenner could hear the old man now: "That blasted Brenner! Here we are, a space station a million miles from anywhere, and he has to lose our best craft for us! I knew that blinkety-blank halfwit would pull some lame-brained stunt like this. I knew it, I knew it, I...."

Brenner cut Hale off and began to think about Earth. And home. And Barbara. And the nameless little thing who must have come months ago, and whom he would have seen within a year if he hadn't been so Godawful stupid as to lose himself out here.

Well, at least he had the radio. And a good supply of food. And the knowledge that Hale would be keeping all channels clear for a call from him.

He frowned. He should have been able to make radio contact with Base long before this. Perhaps his trouble was in the radio....

Suddenly a strange odor touched his senses. Brenner frowned, sniffing. He'd never smelled anything like that before. It was rather metallic—almost like a short circuit. But not quite.

And then, gradually, the odor became that of coffee. Hot Coffee, percolating somewhere in the ship. He had put some coffee on, hadn't he? He frowned, and then went back to his former thoughts of self-disparagement, accepting the odor as normal, as part of his natural environment, "forgetting" about it.

The first block moved in.

Brenner hardly noticed that he had lost his sense of smell.

Rahll exulted. This was the first impulse he had ever tasted—his jagged cannibal's pattern contracted itself in ecstacy as he twisted the absorbed impulse into his own thought-form. He was still hungry, yes—and that hunger was hardly on the way to being satisfied—but at least this was a beginning. It fired him on—he must have more impulse, more, until he could branch out and find even more....

The hunger rushed over him in waves, deep, welling up from the pit of his thought-pattern, almost overcoming his form with its intensity. Yes, he would have more. Taking the first impulse had been simple; as soon as this other being had accepted the bogus odor as being normal, his frequency had become harmonious with Rahll's, and Rahll had moved a block into the channels through which the impulse flowed and absorbed the impulse. Now the block remained in those odor-channels, preventing other impulses from travelling in them.

Rahll turned his attention to the satisfaction of his hunger.

Brenner sniffed. That's funny—hadn't he smelled coffee a minute ago?

Wait a minute—he couldn't have smelled coffee. There wasn't any coffee on. But there must have been, because he'd smelled it.

He sniffed again. He couldn't smell anything now. Odd. He leaned back in his chair and listened as the atomic and electric generators hummed in the background....

The second block moved in.

The sound of the generators disappeared.

Brenner started. But he couldn't have heard the generators—they were off! He rose. All was silent in the ship. He banged on the control panel with his fist.

He heard no sound.

Panic set in.

Rahll's cannibal-pattern contracted and protracted in the black void. The faint blue lines of his form glowed a bit more strongly now than they had before, although the great hunger still shook his frame.

His thought-forms wove in and out in visions of power, a power he had never thought of possessing back in the time of the Great Pattern, a power with which he could absorb everything, every—

And then Rahll's thought-form twisted into a totally unfamiliar shape. And he thought of Hale.

He could picture Hale only vaguely; a big man—man; that was a new term—a big man, whatever a man was, with a deep voice—voice, another new term—and a great temper—temper....

Rahll slowed his pattern in confusion. Man, voice, temper, Hale—all of these; he had never been aware of them before, nor of things like them. Why was he aware of them now?

And then he realized why.

This alien being's patterns, even though scattered and unmethodical, were influencing Rahll's patterns as Rahll came into close contact with them during the process of absorption. Just as Rahll's patterns must be influencing this alien being's.

Rahll formed and reformed thoughts for a moment, and then decided that this was a good thing. For now he would have new weapons with which to trick this other electrical impulse; new and better weapons. Hale, man, voice, temper.

At that moment, Brenner was experiencing much the same phenomenon as Rahll was.

Brenner's panic died suddenly as he searched his thoughts and found, with a shock, that he knew why he could not hear. He could see the answer only dimly, but it was there; something completely alien to him, something outside the ship, a crystal-like pattern of electricity—of electrical impulse—was—was doing something else alien to him which had caused him to lose his sense of sound.

He sat down and concentrated on this answer. There must be more to it, he thought, more to it than.... Yes, there was more to it. He received jumbled thoughts concerning frequencies alien to each other, and then pulled out the one totally clear impression he had. Illusions were being used to dupe him. He wasn't quite sure of exactly how they were being used—something to do with alien frequencies cropped up again—but he did know that the alien being outside his ship was using illusion to slowly destroy him. But wasn't there a way out?

Yes, there was. If he didn't accept the illusion, whatever it was, as being normal, he could not be touched by this creature outside. If he did not accept the illusion as being normal....

Brenner turned on the electric generator. The room flooded with light.

Rahll tensed when he felt the other, larger impulse that he had first felt rise up again. The impulse was far too huge to absorb; and, furthermore, there was something about it that almost repelled Rahll. It was impulse, yes, but it was a different kind of impulse, of a type Rahll had not run across before. If he had been strong enough he could have consumed it, but he was not sure that he would have wanted to.

He steeled himself against the overpowering sense of the presence of that impulse, and carefully searched out the other, smaller one. When he found it, he began to think. Certainly this being's impulse had picked up the pattern which Rahll was following; therefore this being would be on his guard against Rahll's simulations of his environment. Rahll had to sneak under that guard, carefully, subtly, in as unnoticeable a way as possible.

He felt that he could absorb two channels of impulse this time. He picked the two, and began to weave rhythmically in thought.

Brenner sat back in his chair. He was ready for the thing, whatever it was. It would not creep under his defenses. Nothing it could do, no illusion it could form, would take him in. He would not allow it to. He could not allow it to; for patterns had been invoked in his mind that suggested what the creature would do with the power derived from Brenner's impulse if it ever absorbed it all; patterns which pictured the absorption of all life on other worlds, and a single great pattern of electrical current crisscrossing in spiderweb fashion throughout the universe; a strong, unbreakable chain of intelligence, sated with the impulse of every fish, bird, insect, and man in existence. Brenner suppressed a shudder. What he was up against might be too much for him to handle....

No. He had to handle it. For Barbara's sake. For Hale's sake. For the sake of all those men back at Base, who would be the creature's next prey if it destroyed Brenner.

Suddenly there was a clanking noise. Brenner stiffened, for he did not hear the sound with his useless ears; it formed within his mind. The gruff, temper-tinged voice he heard came from within his mind, too; "Brenner, you damned fool. I knew you'd get yourself into a fix like this. Our best craft, too." Brenner whirled around.

The tall, heavy-set figure of Hale stood by the airlock, smiling.

Brenner frowned. The alien must be a complete fool; Brenner would never accept a bogus Captain Hale where Captain Hale could not be.

Hale's figure strode forward, saying, with that fixed smile on its face, "I always thought you'd wind up like this: lost in deep space, with nothing around you. Have you looked at that radio? Sure it's not what's on the blink? Oh, that's right, you wouldn't be able to hear it even if it was in good shape," the words flowed through Brenner's head, "wouldn't be able to. Have a cigar, while you stand there thinking. You're going to have to think hard to get out of this one, Brenner. Mighty blasted hard." And a deep chuckle shook Brenner's skull as the figure of Hale opened its mouth to laugh—and opened it, grotesquely, a trifle too far for a genuine human mouth to go.

Brenner puffed at the proffered cigar. Something was wrong here—the alien could not be this obvious in his working. Brenner's mind steadily refused to accept the thing that stood before him.

The figure cocked an eye at him. "If you don't get back to the station," it said, "you'll never see Barbara again. Or the kid. You know that, don't you? And you want to see Barbara don't you? Don't you?"

Brenner did not answer.

The figure smiled. "Well, you can see her, if you want to. Right now." And the figure's body and face grew smaller, softened in their lines, and the clothing it wore changed from a severe blue uniform to a light blue dress. "Hello, Will," said Barbara's figure.

Brenner still kept silent, staring at the woman's form before him. It was so like her—and in its arms it held a small bundle, which gurgled softly. Brenner's eyes fell to this bundle.

Barbara's figure saw the direction of his glance. "You haven't seen the baby yet, have you, Will?" she said, moving toward him. "Look." She held the small bundle out toward him.

But as she did, one of her hands dug into the blankets wrapped around the tiny form, wrenched the form from those blankets, and threw it to the floor. Barbara's face, now covered with a too-wide grin, looked up at Brenner as her feet stamped the small figure to a red pulp. "Look, Will," she said, and laughed, stretching her mouth wider, wider, until her face was distorted completely out of shape, and her black hair streamed wildly in the air.

Brenner stood paralyzed. The laughter was filling his mind, overcrowding everything else, becoming louder, and louder, and....

It stopped. The red pulp on the floor disappeared, as did the other gnarled figure. All was silent, as it had been before.

Gone. The creature was gone, and it had not hurt him at all. Brenner, still rooted in shock, took a few more thoughtless puffs on the cigar the alien had handed him.

The third and fourth blocks moved into place.

The cigar disappeared.

Brenner could no longer feel or taste.

Rahll rolled in the darkness, his blue line-form glowing more strongly than before. His cannibal-pattern flowed into the thought of all the impulse in the universe around him; of the time when he would be able to branch out, find the stars which were concealed here by distance and time, and absorb the many life-impulses living around those stars, satisfying completely the burning hunger within him.

His third plan had worked admirably. He had shocked the other being with obtrusive actions into a state in which he did not notice inobtrusive actions. That would work again.

He was still bothered by the other, huge impulse which throbbed against his pattern; it seemed strangely adamant and.... But he couldn't find the exact word for what repelled him.

He pushed the pattern aside. Enough time to worry about that after he had absorbed the fifth branch of impulse of the alien being nearby.

Again, Rahll's thoughts turned to a method of operation. What illusion to form now...?

Brenner sat in the nose section of the ship, his head throbbing. The alien's visions of power were now perfectly clear in his mind, but for some reason they did not bother him any more. He had been tricked by that thing outside; he had to fight back somehow. That and that alone mattered now.

And a way to fight back was slowly creeping into his thoughts; some formless fear the being had of the impulses formed by the electric generator. Perhaps if he could trick the alien into....

Whang! A loud noise cut through his mind.

He jumped up and turned toward the back of the compartment; just in time to see a shadow flick through and close the door there.

He ran to the back, turned the wheel in the center of the door, pulled the door open, and staggered into the second compartment. Whang! Something hit him across the back of his neck. He jerked and crashed to the floor, fighting to maintain consciousness.

With a desperate lunge, he grabbed at the wall and pulled himself to his feet. Then he looked to the back of the second compartment, just in time to see the shadow flick through the door.

He dashed through the doorway into the third compartment. For a second Barbara's face grinned impishly at him from the door at the end of the room, and then disappeared. Brenner plunged to the doorway through which she had gone and jumped into the fourth compartment.

For a moment he stood looking around the completely empty room.

Then the fifth block moved into place.

Brenner could not see.

It was then that he remembered that his ship had only three compartments.

Somehow he made his way back to the nose compartment. He was completely cut off from the rest of his body by Rahll's five blocks; only his seat of thought remained. And if that were taken away....

He seemed to be able to sense objects about him, although he could neither see nor feel them; but he did not stop to try to understand this. Instead, he sat down and began to concentrate. To concentrate on further scraps of information that had been left with him by this last close contact with Rahll; information which pointed toward a possible way of stopping the thing outside.

He had received before the impression of Rahll's half-fear of the electrical impulses formed by the generator of the ship; now he was fairly certain of the reasons for Rahll's reluctance to absorb these impulses.

In the first place, they were too strong for Rahll's thus far under-developed body.

In the second, they were inflexible. True, if Brenner turned a dial he could change their amperage, but they were formed on a basis of friction, not of chemical reaction, as Brenner's and Rahll's impulses were. The generator's impulses were not stimulated by certain stimuli at certain times, but flew from the generator in a continuous, hard, stable stream, inflexible, unable to be woven about into thought patterns, unable to be twisted by Rahll.

And this told Brenner how to stop the alien.

Sensing his way, he reached a medicine cabinet, and sensed out a bottle of morphine; carefully he measured out the right amount, and set it on a table beside the equipment that controlled the electrical generator.

Then Brenner began to slow the generator down. The lights dimmed, becoming lower and lower....

He knew that Rahll was waiting outside, waiting to consume the last weak impulse in Brenner's body; he also knew that Rahll would probably automatically consume any electrical impulse of a frequency harmonious with the creature's that was of the same level as Brenner's without noticing that it came from a generator instead of Brenner, because of the hunger that threatened to overpower Rahll and render him insensible in the lust for food.

Brenner continued to lower the speed of the generator. He also knew that Rahll would not be deceived if there were two separate impulses on the same level to distinguish between. In that case, Rahll would undoubtedly pick out Brenner's because of Brenner's alien frequency. So Brenner had to lower his own impulse. He had to lower it to its most basic function; that of causing the heart to beat.

He took a glass of water and swallowed the morphine.

As the haze began to blot out his thoughts, he continued to turn the generator down, down....

Rahll sensed the drop in the larger electrical impulse; he followed it as it dropped, until it was on the same level as the other impulse was. Wait! What other impulse?

Rahll's thought-patterns stopped in confusion. This current was the only impulse on the same level as the alien one. Rahll pondered for a moment; if this was the only impulse on the right level, then he must have confused the two impulses for a moment, and this was actually the right one. Yes, that had to be it.

He examined the impulse, sensing around it—and his crystal-shaped form jumped in surprise. The alien frequency which he had had to trick by illusions into becoming harmonious with his own was gone from this impulse. He would be able to absorb this impulse at his will. True, there was something familiarly repulsive about it, but he was hungry, and....

After only a short hesitation, Rahll's electric jaws opened, widened to full size, and closed greedily on the impulse.

Too late he realized his mistake. His puny blocks were unable to hold up against the continuous, non-chemically produced stream of electricity from the generator. More and more impulse flowed into his body, more and more inflexible impulse, which he could not twist into his cannibal's thought-pattern, torrents of perfectly stable electricity, slowly influencing his own pattern as he had expected to influence the impulse, influencing his into a frozen, stable, inflexible pattern of continuous hunger-satisfaction.

His crystalloid jaws spread wide, Rahll floated in the black void of space, motionless, unable to move, unable to twist into new thought-patterns, and therefore unable to think. The inflexible current of electricity poured steadily into his body....

Slowly the effects of the morphine wore off, and the haze lifted from Brenner's mind. As his power to think returned, he began to realize that his plan had worked, and that the alien had been overcome; and he was glad of this only because it removed him, Brenner, from danger. He no longer cared that the creature might have absorbed the impulses of every living being in existence; the thing was frozen, and he was safe from it—that was all that mattered to him.

Of course he could not see, or feel, or hear the motionless crystalloid pattern outside. But he knew it was there. He could sense it.

He could sense it because his heretofore unmethodical hub-impulse pattern, in its close association with Rahll's, had been slowly twisted and molded into a form very much like the alien's, giving him Rahll's powers of sightless observation of other impulses and objects. Brenner no longer had any need for his lost powers of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch.

He groped his way back to the nose seat, sensing his way as he could not feel it. He would find Base—he would be able to sense the way back to it as soon as it was close enough. He would go back to Base, because, naturally, his basic thought-form had also been molded into the shape of Rahll's; and Brenner was hungry, and he knew he could find food at Base.

Food. He pictured Hale, and the other men at the station.

Food. His jagged cannibal's pattern contracted in ecstacy at the thought of it.

He activated the atomic generator and whirled the ship around.

THE END