Travis found himself nursing a small wicked desire to have the cabbage-beans do their worst to Ross, not with as devastating results as the jelly—he wouldn’t wish that on anyone! But if they would just make themselves felt enough to prove to Murdock that food testing was not as easy as all that. . . .
“Waiting for them to turn me inside out?” Ross grinned.
Travis flushed and then the stain spread and deepened on his cheeks as he realized how he had given himself away. He pushed the cracker-bread to one side and got up to select with inward—if not outward—defiance a tall cylinder which sloshed as he pried at its cap.
“Misery loves company,” Ross continued. “What does that smell like?”
Travis had been encouraged by his discovery of the bread. He sniffed hopefully at the cone opening and then snatched the holder away from his nose as a white froth began to puff out.
“Maybe you have the push-button soap,” Ross commented unhelpfully.- “Give the stuff a lick, fella, you have only one stomach to lose for your country.”
Travis, so goaded, licked—suspicious and expecting something entirely unpalatable. But, to his surprise, though it was sweet, the froth was not so sickly as the stew had been. Rather, the result on the tongue was refreshing, carrying satisfaction for his craving for water. He gulped a bigger mouthful and sat waiting, a little tensely, for fireworks to begin inside him.
“Good?” Ross inquired. “Well, your luck can’t be rotten all the time.”
“This luck is mixed.” Travis capped the foam which had continued to boil wastefully from the bottle. “We’re alive— and we’re still traveling.”
“Traveling is right. A little more information as to our destination would be useful and comforting—or the reverse.”
“The world the builders of this ship owned can’t be too different from ours,” Travis repeated observations made earlier by Ashe. “We can breathe their air without discomfort, and maybe cat some of their food.”
“Twelve thousand years. . . . D’you know. I can say that but I can’t make it mean anything real.” Ross’s hostility had either vanished or been submerged. “You say the words but you can’t stretch your imagination to make them picture something for you—or do you know what I mean?” he challenged.
Travis, rasped on an ancient raw spot, schooled down some heat before he replied. “A little. I did four years at State U. We don’t wear our blankets and feathers all the time.”
Ross glanced up, a flicker of puzzlement in those cold gray eyes.
“I didn’t mean it like that—for what it’s worth.” Then he smiled and for the first time there was nothing superior or sardonic in that expression. “Want the whole truth, fella? I picked up what education I had before I went into the Project the hard way—no State U. But you studied the chief’s racket —archaeology—didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“So—what does twelve thousand years mean to you? You deal with time in big doses, don’t you?”
“That’s a long span on our world, jumps one clear back to the cave period.”
“Yeah—before they put up the pyramids of Egypt—before they learned to read and write. Well, twelve thousand years ago, these blue boys had the stars for theirs. But I’m betting they haven’t kept them! There hasn’t been a single country on our world, not even China, that has had a form of civilization lasting that long. Up they climb and then—“ he snapped his fingers. “It’s kaput for them, and another top dog takes over the power. So maybe when we get to this port Renfry believes we’re homing for, well find nothing, or else someone else waiting for us there. You can bet one way or another and have a good chance of winning on either count. Only, if we do find nothing—then maybe our number’s up for sure.”
Travis had to accept the logic of that. Suppose they did come into a port which had ceased to exist, set down on a strange world from which they could not lift again because they had not the skill to pilot the ship. They would be exiles for the rest of their lives in a space uncharted by their kind.
“We’re not dead yet,” Travis said.
Ross laughed. “In spite of all our efforts? No—that’s our private battle cry, I think. As long as a man’s alive he’s going to keep kicking. But it would be good to know just how long we’re going to be shut up in this ship.” His usual half flippancy of tone thinned over that last as if his carefully cultivated self-sufficiency was beginning to show the slimmest of cracks.
In the end their experiments with the food were partially successful. The crackers Travis continued to label “corn”; the foam and Ross’s cabbage-beans could be digested by the interior apparatus of a human being without difficulty. And they added to that list a sticky paste with the consistency of jam and a flavor approaching bacon, and another cake-like object which, though it had a sour tang that puckered the mouth, was still edible. Greatly daring, Travis tapped the aliens’ water supply and drank. Though the liquid had a metallic aftertaste which the drinker could not relish, it was not harmful.
In addition the younger members of the involuntary crew made themselves useful in the cautious investigations carried on by Ashe and Renfry. The technician was in an almost constant state of frustration during the hours he spent in the control cabin trying to study machines he dared not activate or dismantle for the fuller examination he longed to make. Travis was seated behind him one morning—at least it was ten o’clock by Renfry’s watch, their only method of time-keeping —when there was a change to report, to report and take action on.
A shrill buzz pierced the usual silence, beeping what must be a warning. Renfry grabbed at the small mike of the ship’s com circuit.
“Strap down!” He rasped the order with rising excitement. “There’s an alert sounding here—we may be coming in to land. Strap down!”
Travis grabbed at the protecting bands on his chair. Below they must be scrambling for the bunks. There was vibration again—he was sure he could not mistake that. The ship no longer felt inert and drifting—she was coming alive.
What followed was again beyond his powers of description. The action came in two parts, the first a queasy whirl of sensation not far removed from what they had experienced when the ship had been whirled through the time transfer. Limp from that, Travis lay back, watching the vision plate which had been blank for so long. And when his eyes caught what was not appearing there, he gave a cry of recognition.
“That’s the sun!”
A point of blazing yellow set a beacon in the black of space.
“A sun,” Renfry corrected. “We’ve made the big hop. Now it’s the homestretch—into the system. . . .”
That blaze of yellow-red was already sliding away from the plate. Travis had an impression that the ship must be slowly rotating. Now that the brighter glare of the sun was gone he could pick up a smaller dot, far smaller than the star which nurtured it. That held steady on the plate.
“Something tells me, boy,” Renfry said in a small and hesitant voice, “that’s where we’re going.”
“Earth?” A warm surge of hope spread through Travis.
“An earth maybe—but not ours.”
9
“WE’RE down.” Renfry’s voice, thin, harsh, broke the silence of the control cabin. His hands moved to the edge of the panel of levers and buttons before him, fell helplessly on it. Though he had had nothing to do with that landing, he seemed drained by some great effort.
“Home port?” Travis got the words out between dry lips. The descent had not been as nerve- and body-wracking as their take-off from his native world, but it had been bad enough. Either the aliens’ bodies were better attuned to the tempo of their ships, or else one acquired, through painful experience, a conditioning to such wrenching.
“How would I know?” Renfry flared, plainly eaten by his own frustration.
Their window on the outside world, the vision plate, did mirror sky again. But not the normal Terran sky with its blue blaze which Travis knew and longed to see again. This was a blue closer to green, assuming the hue of the turquoise mined in the hills. There was something cold, inimical in that sky.
Cutting up into the open space was a structure which gave off a metallic glint. But the smooth sweep of those dull red surfaces ended in a jagged splinter, raw against the blue-green, plainly marking a ruin.
Travis unfastened his seat straps and stumbled to his feet, his body once more adjusting clumsily to the return of gravity. As much as he had come to dislike the ship, to want his freedom from it, at this moment he had no desire to emerge under that turquoise sky and examine the ruin pictured on the plate. And just because he did have that reluctance, he fought against it by going.