“Though,” Dana said, “we don’t have any record of existence anywhere but here, in Diamond.”
“I’m sorry,” Hansen said.
It bothered him that these people kept apologizing to him when hell, either he was at fault or nobody was. He got out of the car and walked toward the rows of grain.
Diamond wasn’t an elaborate stage set. Hansen’s boots sank into the turned earth. The air was fresh with the scents of growth, and a cloud of small insects rose from the shade beneath the leaves as he reached into the grain.
The crop was still green, the grainheads unformed. Hansen stroked the fine-haired leaves.
His outfitters had given him a ruby ring in a massive gold setting for the middle finger of his right hand. The stone was now as dull as a chip of cement, and Hansen was quite sure that the one-shot laser which the ruby focused no longer functioned.
He turned back to his hosts. They had waited beside the car in attitudes of hopeful attentiveness.
“Do you have criminals on Diamond?” he asked abruptly.
“Oh, no, Mr. Hansen,” Lea replied.
Hansen smiled lopsidedly. “Then I’m damned if I know what good I could ever be to you,” he said as he took his seat in the car again. “But I guess I’m here anyway.”
“Oh, Mr. Hansen,” Gorley said, “you can’t imagine how wonderful it is to us to have a visitor! We weren’t sure that it was possible to enter or leave Diamond.”
“May we return to the village, then?” Dana asked. “Or perhaps you’d like to see the animals?”
“The village is fine with me,” Hansen said. There was a mild low-frequency vibration through the frame of the aircar for a moment as the driver raised his power. “You know, I’d sort of figured you were vegetarians.”
“Ah, well, we are,” explained Gorley diffidently. “But we use milk and wool, you see.”
The car climbed as swiftly as it had dropped minutes before; he’d been right about the vehicle having plenty of power. “You’ve been trying to get out of your bubble, then?” he asked.
“Oh, goodness, no!” said Dana in amazement. He blushed in embarrassment. “I am sorry. We just—we’re happy here.”
“It’s the knowledge that we miss,” explained Gorley. “It’s all very well to speculate about our existence, but proof that there is an outside universe is quite marvelous.”
Lea bent close and kissed Hansen’s cheek. “We do hope you’ll be comfortable in Diamond.”
Instead of returning to the section of promenade where Hansen’s capsule had appeared, the aircar circled the building and dropped onto a purpose-built docking area where hundreds of similar vehicles were already parked. “The community is gathering in the common area,” Gorley said. “That seemed simplest.”
“But if it makes you uncomfortable to be on display, even briefly,” Dana said, “of course your peaceful enjoyment is far more important to us.”
“To all of us,” Lea agreed and nestled closer to her guest.
There was a bank of at least twenty elevators, each of them sized to hold half a dozen people. Cages and shafts alike were of a material whose crystalline transparency had been slightly dulled by dust and use. Again, Diamond hadn’t been somehow raised as an elaborate hoax to fool Hansen.
The aircar’s driver waved and got into a separate cage. Hansen didn’t see the controls—or, for that matter, the elevator’s drive and suspension apparatus—but he and his three guides dropped to a level forty meters beneath the roofline and got off when the door rotated open.
The whole area was open except for the eight massive pillars which housed the elevators as well as supporting the building’s upper stories. Plants grew around the outer edges and a lightshaft in the center.
The ten-meter ceiling kept the space from looking packed, but it was full of people who waved and cheered when Hansen got off the elevator. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a crowd that big with a happy ambiance to it.
“We have a little dais built for you, if you don’t mind,” Dana said, bending close to speak directly into Hansen’s ear.
Lea gripped his hand with friendly firmness as she led him to up a short flight of steps to a chair on a plastic platform. “If you could say a few words, that would be wonderful,” the young woman said as she motioned Hansen to the seat.