Free The Parallel Man by Richard Purtill

the door. Inside was a great circular room filled with glittering shapes and lights which marched in slow patterns across panels. Before the panels sat crewmen, some human and some not. Several glanced my way; the feathered creature seeming to turn his head completely around to do so. At one end of the room was a chair like a throne, and behind it a semicircular sweep of carpeted floor. Pacing along this floor in what seemed to be a well-worn path, her hands clasped loosely behind her back, was the captain, Elena Petros. She came to the end of her carpeted area, turned and saw me. She gestured me to come to her and I walked over and stood at the edge of the carpet, somehow reluctant to step onto what seemed a private preserve.
    Her face and voice seemed almost normal as she greeted me, but it was all will power and magnificent control; her fine eyes had no sparkle and her body was slack when she did not make it move to her will. “You’re very active for a passenger, Citizen Thorn,” she said. “Some of them do nothing but stare at the walls. You’ll be glad of it when you get planetside; you should be out of freeze in the minimum time. Right now we’re busy trying to chart a possible anomaly.
    But come back to the bridge after we come out of Q; you’ll get a better view of planetfall from here. It won’t mean much at the time, but it will be something to remember.”
    I saluted and left her then, casting an incurious eye on crewmen who stared intently at lighted panels or manipulated curious instruments. Again I exercised, ate and prowled the corridors. Eventually, lights flashed again and a starry sky glowed again on the View in my room. A faint vibration began in the fabric of the ship and after a while one star began to shine more and more brightly. Soon it became a tiny disc, too bright to look at until Pellow touched a circle at the side of the screen and the brilliance faded to a bearable level. “This is a crew cabin,” he said. “Cut-off would be automatic on the View in a passenger cabin. Otherwise some passengers would stare at the primary till they damaged their sight.”
    He stood back from the View, then walked toward it, scanning the stars. Eventually he pointed to a star fainter than many of the others. “That’s a planet,” he said. “Probably Carpathia, because we seem to be heading for it.” He pressed another circle beside the view and the stars altered their pattern. The faint star was now a tiny disc and the star which had shone so bright was a white circle near the edge of the View. “Long way out yet,” he said. “We won’t land until tomorrow. I’d try to sleep if I were you; it will be real sleep now that we’re out of Q.” I lay down on my bed and after a while began to feel drowsy. For the first time since I had boarded this strange craft I lost consciousness.
    I awoke feeling heavy and unrefreshed, cleaned myself up and made my way back to the circular room Elena Petros had called the “bridge.” Several panels in the room now showed starry sky with a blue disc in the center. The captain was seated in her thronelike chair and beckoned me to her side. On a great screen which faced her chair I saw starry sky and a blue disc the size of a man’s head at the center. It all looked very much as things had looked at the beginning of our voyage and I coldly realized a truth that had, for now, no emotional impact. We had journeyed the heavens, from to star.
    “Let’s have extreme magnification on the port city,” said Elena Petros, and suddenly the screen before us showed a view from a great height of a sprawling city, even larger than the city I had left to begin this voyage, but on a more human scale with buildings large and small, old and new, jumbled together.
    “This is Thorn,” said Captain Petros. For a moment I didn’t comprehend. Thorn was a little village, huddled below the Castle. Then a familiar outline caught my eye, and my eyes traced the craggy shape of the