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he had left, when she had met Take on the roof of Narvo’s house, she had tried to find out from Take what Clovis sought, but the strange man had refused to answer. And when she had asked him why he pursued Clovis, Take had seemed surprised. “I’m not his pursuer,” he had said. “I am more or less his guardian—though not of an ordinary kind, perhaps.”
    Then Take had left, following Clovis towards the space field.
    Oh, Clovis, come back. Come back!

eight The Bleak World

    T he individual who called himself Take had been following Clovis Marca for six months of his time and Earth’s and something like two weeks ship time. Take had given himself a shot of tempodex which slowed his time sense as well as ensuring that his body-processes functioned in relation to the time that would have passed on Earth had he been there. This was unusual, since most men wanted the time to pass as quickly as possibly. The anguish they called space-ache was only bearable for a short time. Yet Take seemed to suffer nothing.
    Following Marca had been difficult at first, not because of the warp jumps which were regular and automatic, but because when in normal space, as they were now, Marca’s course had been erratic. Evidently he had lost control of his ship several times before taking the decision to put the ship on a fully-automatic pre-set course. As Take knew, the only trouble with letting the ship do everything was that once the necessary co-ordinates had been locked in it was impossible to alter them until planet-fall was made. This was to ensure that a man gone mad with space-ache could not do anything harmful to himself. It had seemed that Marca had not immediately decided where he was going although Take, who had seen Marca’s astrocharts and the course plotted on them, had felt sure he would make straight for the Bleak Worlds of Antares.
    Take could not anticipate which planet in Antares Marca was now heading for, but at least he knew for certain now that that was where Marca was going.
    Take rubbed the muscles at the back of his neck and watched his screen. They should be going into warp soon. He hoped that Marca didn’t know he was being followed.
    Clovis Marca didn’t know he was being followed. He didn’t know very much more than that he was in extreme pain.
    It was pain bearing little relation to earthly pain. It was pain that could only be described in one word— space-ache—and that word could only be understood by those who experienced a journey away from Earth.
    It was a pain that dredged burning fantasies from the complex labyrinth of the mind, a pain that created illusions that created pain. Away from Earth, away from its precedents and its heritage, the human body and its brain found itself unable to accept that it could be somewhere else, and it reacted desperately. Nerves and muscles, unable to adapt to the concept given them by the brain, sought return. And the mind itself, bewildered, attempted to create, somehow, what it had lost. Yet part of the mind could accept the concept, could accept where it was, and that part sought to control the rest. Thus the body and mind of Clovis Marca became a battleground and though he was conscious, though his senses were functioning and his motor-impulses were usually under his control, he lived in a half-world of agonised illusion wherein he sometimes thought he was on Earth yet knew he was in space.
    And all the time—pain.
    The longer he remained away from Earth, the worse his condition became.
    Fed automatically, exercised automatically, he lay enclosed in a rigid cocoon. Sometimes he was aware of the cocoon and sometimes he was not. He had been imprisoned ,at his own instigation when he had locked the ship’s destination in to the pilot-computer. He would not be released until he made planet-fall, yet even on a planet that was not Earth he would have to fight off the space-ache and its effects.
    The illusions came and went. Sometimes he lay in the grass, a small