Jasse began to rise, glanced up at him; and then sat back suddenly and gave him another look.
“Hello, Jasse!” Hallerock said, in a voice that sounded amiable but remarkably self-assured.
Even when not set off as now by his immaculate blue and white G.Z. dress uniform, Zone Agent Hallerock undoubtedly was something almost any young woman would look at twice. However, it wasn’t so much that he was strikingly handsome with his short-cropped dark-red hair and the clear, black-green eyes with their suggestion of some icy midnight ocean. The immediate point was that you didn’t have to look twice to know that he came from no ordinary planet of civilization.
Jasse got up slowly from behind her desk and came around it and stood before Hallerock.
Basically, that was it perhaps—the world he came from! Mark Wieri VI, a frontier-type planet, so infernally deserving of its classification that only hare-brained first-stage Terrans would have settled there in the first place. Where the equatorial belt was a riot of throbbing colors, a maddened rainbow flowering and ripening, for two months of a thirty-eight month year—and then, like the rest of that bleak world forever, sheet-ice and darkness and the soundless, star-glittering cold.
Even back on Terra, two paths had been open to life that faced the Great Cold as its chosen environment. To grow squalidly tough, devoted to survival in merciless single-mindedness—or to flourish into a triumphant excess of strength that no future challenge could more than half engage.
On Mark Wieri’s world, human life had adapted, inevitably, to its relentlessly crushing environment. In the two hundred and eighty-odd generations between the last centuries of the First Stellar Migrations and the day an exploring Giant-Ranger of the Confederacy turned in that direction, it had become as much a part of its background as the trout is of its pool. And no more than the trout could it see any purpose in leaving so good a place again.
But it had not, in any sense, grown squalid.
So Jasse stood before Hallerock, and she was still looking up at him. There were nine foot three inches of him to look up to, shaped into four hundred and sixty-five lean pounds of tigerish symmetry.
The dress uniform on a duty call was a clue she didn’t miss or need. The ice of his home-planet was in Hallerock’s eyes; but so was the warm, loyal human strength that had triumphed over it and carelessly paid in then the full, final price of conquest. This son of the conquerors alone had been able to sense that the galaxy itself was now just wide and deep and long enough for man; and so he’d joined the civilization that was of a like spirit.
But he, too, had been a giant among little-people then. If his conscious thoughts wouldn’t admit it, every cell of his body knew he’d lost his own kind.
Jasse, all her mind groping carefully, questioningly out towards this phenomenon, this monster-slayer of Galactic Zones—beginning to understand all that and a good deal more—slowly relaxed again.
A kinsman of hers! Her own eyes began to smile, finally.
“Hello, Hallerock!” Jasse said.
* * *
And that was, Pagadan decided, about the right moment to dissolve the PT-cell she’d spent an hour installing in the wall just above the upper right-hand corner of Jasse’s study mirror.
Those two baby giants might be all full of emotional flutters just now at having met someone from the old home town; but they were going to start thinking of their good friend Pagadan almost immediately! And one of the very first things that would leap to Hallerock’s suspicious mind would be the possible presence of a Peeping Tommy.
Good thing those tiny units left no detectable trace!
She pulled off the PT-helmet, yawned delicately and sat relaxed for a minute, smirking reminiscently into the vision-tank.
“What I call a really profitable mission!” she informed the vision-tank. “Not a slip anywhere either—and just think how tame it all started out!”
She thought about that for a moment. The silver eyes closed slowly; and opened again.
“It’s no particular wonder,” she remarked, “that Central’s picked me for a Five-Agent job—after only five missions! When you get right down to it, you can’t beat a Lannai brain!”
The hundred thousand friendly points of light in the vision-tank applauded her silently. Pagadan smiled at them. In the middle of the smile her eyes closed once more—and this time, they stayed closed. Her head began to droop forward.
Then she sat up with a start.
“Hey,” she said in drowsy indignation, “what’s all this?”
“Sleepy gas,” the Viper’s voice returned. “If you’re headed for another job, you’re going to sleep all the way to Jeltad. You need your rest.”
“That’s a whole week!” Pagadan protested. But though she could not remember being transported there, she was in her somno-cabin by then, and flat on her back. Pillows were just being shoved under her head; and lights were going out all over the ship.
“You big, tricky bum!” she muttered. “I’ll dismantle your reflexes yet!”
There was no answer to that grim threat; but she couldn’t have heard it anyway. A week was due to pass before Zone Agent Pagadan would be permitted to become aware of her surroundings again.
Meanwhile, a dim hum had begun to grow throughout the Viper’s giant body. Simultaneously, in the darkened and deserted control room, a bright blue spark started climbing steadily up the velocity indicator.
The humming rose suddenly to a howl, thinned out and became inaudible.
The spark stood gleaming steadily then at a point just below the line marked “Emergency.”
Space had flattened out before the Viper—she was homeward-bound with another mission accomplished.
She began to travel—
The Second Night of Summer
On the night after the day that brought summer officially to the land of Wend, on the planet of Noorhut, the shining lights were seen again in the big hollow at the east end of Grimp’s father’s farm.
Grimp watched them for more than an hour from his upstairs room. The house was dark, but an occasional murmur of voices floated up to him through the windows below. Everyone in the farmhouse was looking at the lights.
On the other farms around and in the village, which was over a hill and another two miles up the valley, every living soul who could get within view of the hollow was probably doing the same. For a time, the agitated yelling of the Village Guardian’s big pank-hound had sounded clearly over the hill, but he had quieted down then very suddenly—or had been quieted down, more likely, Grimp suspected. The Guardian was dead-set against anyone making a fuss about the lights—and that included the pank-hound, too.
There was some excuse for the pank-hound’s excitement, though. From the window, Grimp could see there were a lot more lights tonight than had turned up in previous years—big, brilliant-blue bubbles, drifting and rising and falling silently all about the hollow. Sometimes one would lift straight up for several hundred feet, or move off over the edge of the hollow for about the same distance, and hang there suspended for a few minutes, before floating back to the others. That was as far as they ever went away from the hollow.
There was, in fact, no need for the Halpa detector-globes to go any farther than that to get the information wanted by those who had sent them out, and who were listening now to the steady flow of brief reports, in some Halpa equivalent of human speech-thought, coming back to them through the globes:
“No signs of hostile activity in the vicinity of the breakthrough point. No weapons or engines of power within range of detection. The area shows no significant alterations since the last investigation. Sharp curiosity among those who observe us consciously—traces of alarm and suspicion. But no overt hostility.”
The reports streamed on without interruption, repeating the same bits of information automatically and incessantly, while the globes floated and dipped soundlessly above and about the hollow.
Grimp continued to watch them, blinking sleepily now and then, until a spreading glow over the edge of the valley announced that Noorhut’s Big Moon was coming up slowly, like a Planetary Guardian, to make its own inspection of the lights. The globes began to dim out then, just as they always had done at moonrise in the preceding summers; and even before the top rim of the Big Moon’s yellow disk edged over the hills, the hollow was completely dark.
Grimp heard his mother starting up the stairs. He got hurriedly into bed. The show was over for the night and he had a lot of pleasant things to think about before he went to sleep.
Now that the lights had showed up, his good friend Grandma Erisa Wannattel and her patent-medicine trailer were sure to arrive, too. Sometime late tomorrow afternoon, the big draft-trailer would come rolling up the valley road from the city. For that was what Grandma Wannattel had done the past four summers—ever since the lights first started appearing above the hollow for the few nights they were to be seen there each year. And since four years were exactly half of Grimp’s whole life, that made Grandma’s return a mathematical certainty for him.