Some hundreds of light-years away, the Jodrell Bank was making up lost time on its Betelgeuse run.
Herrell McCray swept the long line from Sol to Betelgeuse, with his perceptions that were not his eyes and his touch that was not of matter, until he found it. The giant ship, fastest and hugest of mankind's star vessels, was to him a lumbering tiny beetle.
It held friends and something else—something his body needed—air and water and food. McCray did not know what would happen to him if, while his mind was out in the stars, his body died. But he was not anxious to find out.
McCray had not tried moving his physical body, but with what had been done to his brain he could now do anything within the powers of Hatcher's people. As they had swept him from ship to planet, so he could now hurl his body back from planet to ship. He flexed muscles of his mind that had never been used before, and in a moment his body was slumped on the floor of the Jodrell Bank's observation bubble. In another moment he was in his body, opening his eyes and looking out into the astonished face of Chris Stoerer, his junior navigator. "God in heaven," whispered Stoerer. "It's you!"
"It is," said McCray hoarsely, through lips that were parched and cracked, sitting up and trying the muscles of the body. It ached. He was bone-weary. "Give me a hand getting out of this suit, will you?"
It was not easy to be a mind in a body again, McCray discovered. Time had stopped for him. He had been soaring the star-lanes in his released mind for hours; but while his mind had been liberated, his body, back on Hatcher's "planet," had continued its slow metabolism, its steady devouring of its tissues, its inevitable progress toward death. When he had returned to it he found its pulse erratic and its breathing ragged. A grinding knot of hunger seethed in its stomach. Its muscles ached.
Whatever might become of his mind, it was clear that his body would die if it were left unfed and uncared-for much longer. So he had brought it back to the Jodrell Bank. He stood up and avoided Chris's questions. "Let me get something to eat, and then get cleaned up a little." (He had discovered that his body stank.) "Then I'll tell you everything you want to know—you and the captain, and anybody else who wants to listen. And we'll have to send a dispatch to Earth, too, because this is important.... But, please, I only want to tell it once." Because—he did not say—I may not have time to tell it again.
For those cold and murderous presences in the clustered inner suns had reached out as casually as a bear flicking a salmon out of a run and snatched the unknown woman from Hatcher's planet. They could reach anywhere in the galaxy their thoughts roamed.
They might easily follow him here.

It was good to be human again, and McCray howled with pain and joy as the icy needle-spray of the showers cleansed his body. He devoured the enormous plates of steak and potatoes the ship's galley shoved before him, and drank chilled milk and steaming black coffee in alternate pint mugs. McCray let the ship's surgeon look him over, and laughed at the expression in the man's eyes. "I know I'm a little wobbly," he said. "It doesn't matter, Doc. You can put me in the sickbay as long as you like, as soon as I've talked to the captain. I won't mind a bit. You see, I won't be there—" and he laughed louder, and would not explain.
An hour later, with food in his belly and something from the surgeon's hypospray in his bloodstream to clear his brain, he was in the captain's cabin, trying to spell out in words that made sense the incredible story of (he discovered) eight days since he had been abducted from the ship.
Looking at the ship's officers, good friends, companions on a dozen planetside leaves, McCray started to speak, stumbled and was for a moment without words. It was too incredible to tell. How could he make them understand?
They would have to understand. Insane or not, the insane facts had to be explained to them. However queerly they might stare, they were intelligent men. They would resist but ultimately they would see.
He settled his problem by telling them baldly and plainly, without looking at their faces and without waiting for their questions, everything that had happened. He told them about Hatcher and about the room in which he had come to. He told them about the pinkish light that showed only what he concentrated on—and explained it to them, as he had not understood it at first; about Hatcher's people, and how their entire sense-world was built up of what humans called E.S.P., the "light" being only the focusing of thought, which sees no material objects that it is not fixed on. He told them of the woman from the other ship and the cruel, surgical touch on his brain that had opened a universe to him. He promised that that universe would open for them as well. He told them of the deadly, unknowable danger to Hatcher's people—and to th............