“He wasn’t,” the section commander answered slowly. “Cleeve Weygil was my older brother.”
Oomark shook his head. “He couldn’t be. He’s a little boy like me and you – you’re an old man!”
“They’ve been planted, filled up with a wild story and planted!” Cury broke in again. “Probably sent to beam in some snake-landing party. Best burn them right now.”
“Be quiet!” This time Weygil’s bark was sharp. “Oomark Zobak, his sister Bartare, and Kilda c’ Rhyn.” With his forefinger he pointed to each of us in turn. “But – I remember now! They searched for months and never found any trace of you. The matter was only dropped when the war broke out. After that no one had any time.”
“What war?”
He told us, and his voice sounded as if he were aging years in the setting out of facts as the few remaining on Dylan knew them. There had been the sudden attack of an alien task force aimed at outer ring worlds. That had been defeated in a battle near the Nebula, but it was only the beginning. The destroyed force was but a scouting arm for a vast armada. Raids and more attacks followed. When the strangers were finally beaten, this whole section of the galaxy, once civilized, had been left in a state of chaos in which the strong lived and the weak were swiftly gone. There was no communication left between separate solar systems, even between worlds. Strange diseases spread deliberately or by chance left some planets charnel houses.
Dylan had been hurriedly evacuated by all save a guard force in the third year of the war. For a while the field here at Tamlin bad served as a refitting station for smaller fighting ships. Then ships ceased to come. Five years ago the small garrison sent out their own last scout ship to discover what had happened. It had never returned. Luckily, there was still a huge dump of supplies housed in warehouses around the port.
The holdings, the grazing lands, had early slipped back into the wild. The few remaining families on Dylan had withdrawn to one quarter of the port and were housed in buildings set aside for the military command. They still kept up a constant monitoring for off-world coms, hoping to pick up news. Only they had heard nothing at all for a long time.
“Now,” Cury said as Weygil finished his somber report, “where did you come from? Are you refugees? Or plants sent in to take over?”
Bartare had come to me. Now her hand slipped into mine. The spell that had held her in thrall was gone. She needed what little reassurance I could give her.
“Go on!” Cury urged. “Where did you come from? And don’t tell me out of time fifty years back! If you were sent in by some raiders, it won’t do you any good. We have repulse fields working still, and we’ll see you don’t turn them off!”
“Kilda?” Kosgro spoke to me. Perhaps he thought I might be more readily believed, though the more I thought of our tale, the more impossible I knew it sounded. However, we had nothing to offer but the truth. And that I told them, cutting my narrative to the bare facts as they had happened to me, to Oomark, and to the rest of our small company. Even so, the telling seemed to take a long time and to sound very strange.
When I was done, Weygil spoke first. “Another space-time continuum linked at intervals with other worlds,” he said.
“You mean – you believe them?” demanded Cury.
“The theory is known,” his superior returned. “And it fits what I do know about the disappearance of these three.” He gestured to the children and me. “What about you?” He spoke to Kosgro. “When did you enter that world and how?”
Once more Jorth told of his planeting as a First-In Scout, of his accidental entrapment in the gray world, and of the year when that happened.
“The year 2301!” Cury’s disbelief was sharp.
“Yes, 2301,” Kosgro repeated. “And I think I can furnish you with proof. Oomark says that a scout ship was discovered here and moved to a local museum. You all know the peculiarity of those craft They are on special personna lock and will open only for the one who sets that If the ship is still here – it will open for me and no one else.”
I had forgotten that safeguard of a scout ship. Not only could it be placed on personna lock at planeting, so it could not be entered and could serve as a refuge for the scout if the need arose – but inwardly it was constructed so that its engines responded to one man alone, he who was signed to it. There was no better way for Jorth to prove his identity than to enter that ship.
“Museum?” Weygil repeated, and then excitement colored his voice. “Of course, it would still be there. There would be no reason to move it”
“Then take us there – now!” Kosgro urged.
“Stay with the com,” Weygil ordered Brolster. They kept a day-night watch, hoping some whisper out of space would tell them one day they were not wholly forgotten.
We descended the gray and came out on that apron seared by rocket fire, but which had not felt that hot breath for years. We did not walk back to the ghost city. Weygil had a ground car parked nearby, and though it was small, we all crowded in. The sound of our passing echoed far too loudly as we sped along the empty streets. And I liked less and less the look of those blank windows and the dust and dried leaves and windblown debris that drifted about the buildings. So well built were they that they might well stand here not fifty years, but a hundred – more – a monument to a dead colony. And how many more such worlds swung around suns, some without even a handful of inhabitants to pass through echoing cities? Some must have been burned off and remained dead cinders, others been visited by plagues that left unburied dead lying where they fell. I tried not to think of that. Let me concentrate on the fact that if we had come back to a largely empty world, it was one we knew and not that gray monster-ridden one that had held us prisoners.
Finally we drew up before a two-story building. Pointing skyward beyond it was the nose of a ship poised on its fins, ready to seek its element – space. It was far smaller than the liner that had brought us to Dylan, than even a medium-sized free trader. But it was a ship, and seeing it gave promise that with it mankind was not altogether exiled from the stars.
We passed through the outer court of the museum, Weygil burning off locks with his laser, hurrying on to the outside enclosure that held the scout ship. Kosgro trotted ahead to stand at the foot of one of the fins, dwarfed by the tall rise of the ship, small though it might be for a star traveler. For a moment he surveyed it. Then he spoke aloud, slowly. His words were meaningless to me, yet I knew they must be a lock phrase, some sentence he had set in as a signal.
As easily as if it had been only an hour ago that he left it, a hatch opened on the side. Through that came the boarding ladder, thudding on the pavement at the scout’s feet. He grasped it, ready to climb aboard when Cury moved, throwing himself in a tackle that did not carry Kosgro to the ground, but rather pinned him to the ladder. I think he was so startled by that attack that he did hot struggle.
It was Weygil who cried out. “Cury! What are you doing? He’s proved his point. He certainly is the man he said he was. The ship would not have answered him otherwise.”
“Don’t be a fool!” shouted the other. “He’s a pilot. This is a ship which may be navigable. He can take off – leave us! Leave us to go on rotting – ” Cury’s face was a mask of fury. “He’s not going to take off and leave us!”
Kosgro fought now. What he did to the man pressing him to the ladder I did not see, but suddenly Cury reeled away and back. The scout faced him, his bare hands poised/ in a formalized invitation to unarmed combat. Cury reached for his laser, but the weapon was at the wrong angle for a quick draw, and Kosgro sprang, chopping a blow with the side of his hand at the other’s neck. The ranger slumped at the foot of the ladder. Kosgro rounded on Weygil, his hands ready for defense.
“Relax. I’m not Cury.” Weygil was calm. “Did you kill him?”