Fear that man

poured a second from the decanter. “I don’t agree. If the ship were responsible for Sam’s actions, there would be no reason for hypnotic controls-and really no reason for Sam. If the ship were intelligent itself, it could do everything Sam could do-and possibly better. And when he shot it, it should have been able to order him to throw down the gun. No, the ship was just a cancerous mass of goo that was to convey Sam to Hope. Nothing more.”
        “But what kind of man could make a thing like the jelly-mass?”
        “I think,” Gnossos said, “that there is a chance you are the dupe of an extra-galactic intelligence.”
        “That’s absurd! We’ve never found another intelligent race in the last thousand years. That’s-”
        “That’s frighteningly possible,” Hurkos reflected. “There are thousands and millions of galaxies out there. How do you know a bunch of jelly-masses didn’t kidnap you, take you away, and decide to train you to overthrow the galaxy?”
        Sam finished his wine in a gulp. Heat flooded through his flesh, outward from his stomach. Still, it could not ward off the sharp chill in him. “Because,” he answered in even tones, “that would be one helluva backward way of invading the empire. If these extra-galactics have all this skill, can use something like the jelly for hyperspace travel and making food and operating robosurgeons, they could overturn the galaxy in a month. A week! Hell, that blob even talked to me in a computer voice. Probably forms some crude set of vocal cords when it needs them. And it operated a radar set; it-”
        “It’s a living machine,” Gnossos said, almost to himself.
        “That’s another thing,” Hurkos added. “Your fear of machines. You got it, obviously, because whoever-or whatever-hypnotized you fears machines also. Because he, it, or they do not use machines. They have blobs instead. We have nothing like this. It almost proves they’re extra-galactic!”
        “One couldn’t live in the empire without the aid of machines,” Gnossos agreed. “One would have to be from… Outside.”
        “No.” Sam set his glass on the floor. “If there were aliens with this sort of thing, they wouldn’t need me. This is something smaller than an entire extra-galactic race. This is someone who needs help, who needs an automaton to do his dirty work.”
        “Agreed also,” the poet said. “Looks like there is a stalemate in this conversation and this line of thought.” He heaved his bulk to a more comfortable position. “Well, I for one, am sticking with you until this mystery is solved. I couldn’t bear to quit with the whole thing raveled up. This could be the most important, most dangerous event of the last thousand years. And one thing that there is just too little of these days is danger. Warring man might have been crude, but he sure as the devil had his fill of danger in a lifetime. Today we travel on, living hundreds of years, and everything is so safe and perfect that we hardly ever experience danger. I’m long overdue for some excitement!”
        “Me too, I guess,” Hurkos said. Sam had the feeling the Mue was not terribly comfortable since the jelly-mass had attacked them. But he would not-could not-back down in front of the poet.
        “So what next?”
        Gnossos rubbed a huge paw across his chin, wrinkled his nose for a moment. “We set this tub on a course for Hope. When we get there, we wait for your next command. We’re going to find out the answers to this.”
        “But,” Sam said uneasily, “suppose I am out to overturn the galaxy?”
        “Hurkos and I will be right behind you to stop you before you have a chance.”
        “I hope so,” he said.
        Later, after more wine and much conjecture, as The Ship of the Soul plunged through the thick river of the void, they retired, leaning back in their chairs, belting themselves in, and shutting their mouths so that they could neither consume nor converse. And eventually they fell into sleep…
         There was deep and awful darkness, save for the scattered pinpoints of the stars dotting the roof of the night. Then, as the breeze shifted, dawn came crawling over the horizon, tinting the blackness with yellow… then orange… And there was still a hill with a cross upon it. There was a man on the cross. His hands were dripping blood.
         And his feet were dripping blood…
         The wounds were festered and black demon