Aton took it. He stood up and strode toward the group once more. Again the women shuffled away, some not even facing him, but moving in automatic steps with the others. And again the fever struck.

He realized that the fever was under conscious direction. As he withdrew toward the pool, it eased; as he advanced on the zombies, it clamped down. The message was clear: leave them alone.

Aton made his reply clear. He focused his mind on the dominating picture of his love, his unobtainable minionette, and continued to advance. He struck with his free hand at the nearest woman; the coordination required to wield the axe was beyond him. She fell without a sound, to lie as the man had lain. The strain of transition must have weakened the zombies so much that any added shock was fatal. He could kill with a single blow.

“Kill—!” he thought. “But these are human beings, the people I have traveled with and lived with through the most terrible adventures of our lives. How can I kill them?”

But he knew the answer to that, and in the disorientation of the mental attack the reasoning made sense: kill, because these people were no longer human. They had given up their minds and wills to some Chthon influence as insidious as the caterpillar, and death was merciful. He knew this intellectually, and he felt it, somehow, emotionally: there was no personality remaining in the zombies. Kill.

The invisible attack against him intensified. His breath was cut off, his sight wavered, but he fought and advanced and struck out almost blindly, again and again, connecting now and then with solid flesh, and all about him the silent females fell. It was carnage; one blow meant death, and there were many blows.

At last the pressure against him became too great, and he fell. Unable to rise, he tried to roll toward the water. But he had pushed himself too far. He succumbed, not to possession but to oblivion.

To—

“Your dream is futile,” the voice seemed to say. “The minionette is forbidden; only while you are apart from her is your emotion real. You cannot bring these opposite poles together; they can unite only in disaster.”

He brought it into focus: a mass of green. It formed into whorls and petals: the flower of the hvee. Petal lips spoke again.

“There is no magic in your song. Only because it is broken does it fascinate you. Only because your love is incomplete does it endure.”

“No!” But somehow it took hold, fatalism rising like the tide, lapping gently at idealistic castles of sand. For the hvee did not lie to its master.

“You are not my master. You are only—”

Aton blanked the image from his consciousness, afraid of what it might say. The flower wavered and turned gray. It was a hanging structure on the ceiling, a crystalline stalactite, cracked and hollow like a monster shell.