And those leafy branches stirred almost languidly as if light breezes pulled at them, showing here and there a touch of other colors. Fruit? Flowers?
Renfry brought their attention away from the scene which was so ethereal as to seem unreal. “Look!”
He was on his feet before the main control board, his hands grasping the back of the pilot’s seat so tightly that the muscles stood out on his taut arms. For the board had taken on life. They had witnessed the flickers of light which had heralded the readying of the ship’s guns. This was something else—a line of small winks of brilliance flowing unevenly down the rows of levers and buttons. And where each flashed a lever arose, a button sank or snapped above the level of the board. There was a final burst of light from a spot Travis could have covered with his thumb. And there a lid opened, a cavity beneath disgorged a small, coin-shaped bit of red metal which tinkled out, to roll across the floor.
Renfry came to life, dove to catch it up. He held it in his hand as if the disk was something very precious indeed.
“Home port!” He swung about to face them, his eagerness lighting a flame in his eyes. “This is the home port! And I think I am holding the course tape!”
There could be no other explanation for what they had just witnessed. The journey plotted by a dying man had come to its full conclusion. That small button of metal Renfry had closed fist upon, held now not only the secret of their arrival— but of their return. If they were ever to regain their own world, it would be because they had solved the workings of that disk.
Yet Travis’ eyes went from the technician’s clenched hand and what it held, back to the vision plate. The picture there was of a. gentle wind lifting flowering branches about a tower of opal against a sky of palest rose. And the immediate future seemed at that moment more entrancing than the more distant one.
Perhaps Ashe shared that feeling at the moment. For the senior time agent moved toward the inner ladder. He paused at the well and looked back over his shoulder, to say with a strange simplicity:
“Let us go out—now.”
12
IP THERE had once been a wide landing strip here, the space was long since swallowed by a cover of green. From the mass crushed by the landing of the ship came the scent of growing things, some spicy, some rank.
The Terrans had not worn their helmets, nor did they need to here. A sunlight no stronger than that of early summer in the temperate zone of their own world greeted them. And there was no burden of sand in the soft wind which whirled flower petals and torn leaves from the wreckage under their feet.
Now that they had a wider view than that offered by the vision plate, they noted other breaks in the luxuriance of growing things. The opal tower with its fantastic form was flanked by another building as strange and as far removed from the style of its companion as the desert world was from this green one. For the massive blocks of dull red, geometric in their solidity, could not have sprung from the same creative imagination—or perhaps from even the same race or age.
And beyond that was another, with knife-sharp gables and narrow windows secretive in its gray walls. It had a pointed roof of some rough material, dull under the sun, and gave rootage in places to vines, even a small tree. But again it was not of the same vintage as the fairylike dome or the massive blocks.
“Why—?” Boss’s head turned slowly as he looked from one of those totally dissimilar buildings to the next. All were tall, dwarfing the globe, and all had their lower stories hidden by the vegetation.
Travis thought back to a past which seemed a little blurred by all which had happened lately. There were places on his own world where a Zuni village in miniature stood beside a Sioux lodge or an Apache wickiup.
“A museum?” He ventured the only explanation he could see.
Ashe’s face was pale under his fading tan. He stared raptly from dome to block, block to sharply accented gables. “Or else a capital where each embassy built in their home style.”
“And now it is all dead,” Travis added. For that was true. This was as deserted as the fueling port.
“Capital perhaps—of a galactic empire. What there is to be learned here! A treasure house—“ Ashe was breathing fast. “We may have the treasures of a thousand worlds to uncover here.”
“And who will ever know—or care?” Ross asked. “Not that I’m not ready to go and look for them.”
Travis tensed. There was a stirring in the mass of tangled vegetation where the grounding of the globe had flattened some of the fern trees, bearing with them others tied together by vines. He watched that shaking of bruised and broken branches. Something alive was working its way from a point about a hundred yards away from the ship toward the wall of still-standing plants, its progress marked by that movement. And the fugitive thing must be fairly large by the amount of displacement.
Had that crawling unseen thing been injured in the crash of the tree ferns? Was it now dragging itself off to die? Travis listened, striving to hear more than the rustling of the leaves. But if the thing was hurt, it made no complaint. Animal? Or—something else? Something as alien as the dune lurkers, more than animal, yet different from man as they knew man?
“It’s in cover now,” breathed Ross. “Couldn’t have been too hurt or it wouldn’t have moved so lively.”
“I think we can believe that this world isn’t as empty as it might look to the first glance,” Ashe said a little dryly. “And what about those?”
“Those” came lightly, drifting across the torn clearing caused by the descent of the globe. They flapped gossamer wings once or twice to keep air-borne, but their attention was manifestly centered on the ship.
And what were they? Birds? Insects? Flying mammals? Travis could almost believe the four small creatures were a weird combination of all three species. Their long narrow wings, prismatic and close to transparent, resembled those of an insect. Yet they had bodies equipped with three legs, two smaller ones in front ending in there claw-shaped digits, one larger limb in back with even more pronounced talons. Their heads seemed to be set directly on their shoulders with no visible neck and were round at the top, narrowing to a curved beak, while their eyes—four of them!—protruded on short stalks, two in front and two in back. And their triangles of bodies were clothed in plushy fur of a pale and frosted blue.
Slowly, in a solemn, silent procession, they drifted toward the ship. The second in line broke out of formation, dipped groundward. Its hind claws found anchorage on a stub of broken branch and its wings folded together above its back as might those of a Terran butterfly.
The two last in line flapped back and forth across the open port twice and then wheeled, flew off, mounting into the sky to clear the treetops. But the leader came on, until it hung, beating wings now and then to maintain altitude, directly before the entrance of the ship.
It was impossible to read any expression in those stalked eyes, a brilliant blue. But none of the four Terrans felt any repulsion or alarm as they had upon their encounter with the nocturnal desert people. Whatever the flyer was, they could not believe that it was either aggressive or a possible danger to them.
Renfry expressed their common reaction to the creature first:
“Funny little beggar, isn’t he? Like to see him closer. If they’re all the same as him here, we don’t have to worry.”
Why the technician should refer to the winged thing as “he” was obscure. But the creature was attractive enough to hold their concentrated interest. Ross snapped his fingers and held out his hand in welcome.
“Here, boy,” he coaxed.
Those brilliant bits of blue winked as the eye stalks moved, the wings beat, and the flyer approached the port. But not close enough for the Terrans to touch. It hung there, suspended in mid-air for a long moment. Then with a flurry of beating wings, sparking rainbows, it mounted skyward, its partner taking off from the brush below at the same moment to join it. A few seconds later they vanished as if they had never been.
“Do you suppose it is intelligent?” Ross watched after the vanished flyer, his disappointment mirrored on his usually impassive face.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Ashe replied. “Renfry,” he spoke to the technician, “you have your journey tape now. Can you reset it?”