Fear that man

position, colder than he should have been with the warm breezes fluffing the night. “No. Not just the physical setup of the ship. That’s strange enough. But that isn’t what-what set me off. It’s the Central Being-what the Central Being is.”
        “What is it, then?”
        Sam opened his mouth, closed it and wet his lips. “The Central Being-God,” he said with some difficulty.
        “Impossible! He’s dead!”
        “The old God is dead. Our God is dead.”
        “Then He didn’t rule the entire universe? There was another God who-”
        “No,” Sam said, waving a hand limply to cut off the questions. He wanted to throw up, to chuck out his meals and his memories. But the latter could not be forced away, and the former would have to be held down if only for the sake of convenience. “He did rule all of the universe. Every speck of it!”
        “But-”
        “But there was a God above Him in yet another universe, a higher dimension. Look at it as a ladder, Andy. We are the bottom rung. Above us was our God-whom we killed. Above that God was this one with a pocket universe of slug ships. When we killed our God, our Keeper, our Master, we destroyed the dimension above us, because He was that entire dimension. The gap created in the ladder caused a sliding down of the rungs. We have meshed with the third rung, and this new God with the slug-forms is in our midst.”
        “And as warped as the God on the second rung.”
        “Exactly.” He was feeling better as he shared the horror, his cheeks flushing to ward off the cold that was really a cold from within.
        “And what does this new God want?”
        “To… destroy us.” He recalled all the lines of thought that had been radiating from the Central Being, flooding through the counter-melodies of Racesong. “Destroy us. Wipe us out to the last man, woman, and child.”
        “Why?”
        “To preserve Its self-importance. We are creatures It never conjured into existence. We are beyond Its control, really, because It is not our God and It is not measurably better than we are. It cannot annihilate us, for It isn’t that powerful. But It can direct Its creatures, the slug-forms, to do the job for It. Since they are vicious fighters and we do not have the power to strike back, it should not be a difficult chore.”
        “We have to get back to the floater,” Coro said, standing and helping Sam to his feet. “We’ve got to get word back to Hope somehow. A warning.”
        They were nearly halfway across the meadow before they heard the noise and saw the whoosh of blue light that gushed from the weapons of the slug-forms surrounding the floater. A steel net had been dropped over the ball, magno-connected to ground pegs spaced every three feet. A tough, tight enclosure, quickly and silently thrown up-even more quickly clamped shut. Lotus and Crazy had probably been achored before they had realized something was happening.
        “The hypnodarts,” Coro whispered, dropping to his knees in the high grass.
        They knelt, only their heads visible above the grass, and stripped themselves of all unnecessary equipment, equipment which would have been necessary had the Racesong not prevented them from exploring Raceship. Then, nervously, they screwed together the two parts of the dart rifles. It was a humane weapon. It caused sleep, but not the ultimate sleep of death. It was, really, the only sort of weapon they could have brought themselves to use against intelligent creatures. Each rifle had a clip of forty darts which slid easily into the butt of the weapon, just above the powerpack.
        Running crouched, rifles at ready in the event they were spotted prematurely, the blue explosions of the slugs’ weapons neon-flashing in the dark, Sam was thinking of Hurkos. Of Hurkos clubbing that pink slug that teetered on the edge of the Shield, that wormy thing that had been God. He remembered the stinking mush of fluids that had spilled from the rips Hurkos had made in its hide. He remembered it writhing in death agony. Clubbing, clubbing, clubbing with a vicious, spiteful swing of the arms. Clubbing… But he was not going to kill! Only put them to sleep. Just sting them for a split second and then give them a nap. And he was saving the lives of the two Mues inside the floater, he argued with himself. Yes. Of course. That must be the way to think of it.
        Wind: cold.
        Light: blue.
        Night: