THE CRUCIBLE OF TIME BY JOHN BRUNNER

For a moment Wellearn thought his forcefulness had won the crowd over, but the idea of quitting the land where the Wego had lived since time immemorial was too great to be digested all at once, and the assembly dispersed without reaching a decision. Vastly disappointed, Wellearn slumped to four-fifths height while watching them depart.

“Excellently done,” said Skilluck softly at his side.

“I thought I’d failed!” Wellearn countered. “At any rate I don’t see them clustering around us to vote Tempestamer the wise’uns’ prize for the past summer!”

“Oh—prizes!” Skilluck said contemptuously. “To be remembered in a score-of-score years: that’s something else. Until I saw how few briqs had made it back to Ushere, all I could think of was how the Hearthomers might cheat us. Now I’ve felt in my tubules how right they are about the grip of ice. It’s time for a heroic gesture, and since someone’s got to make one, it might as well be us. If we can get enough of the folk to emigrate next spring, one day they’ll talk of us as we do of Jing. I felt this as truth. I couldn’t have expressed it. You did. That’s why I say you made a great success of it.”

“Captain,” Wellearn muttered, “I never respected anything so much before as your present honesty. I’m glad to find I guessed right after all but what you’ve just said—”

“Save it,” Skilluck broke in. “And don’t worry about persuading the rest of the folk around to our course. A few score days of cold and hunger will take care of that.”

“I wish I could share your optimism,” Wellearn sighed. “Yet I greatly fear that some of those who refused to listen did so not because they suspected us of lying, but because misery has already taken them past the reach of reason.”

VI

“Uncle,” Embery said musingly to Chard, “do you think Wellearn will come back?”

Grousing at the annual need to adjust the mountings of his telescopes because the branches they rested on had swollen in the rainy season, her fat and fussy uncle finally pronounced himself satisfied with the work of his apprentices. Since it was again too cloudy at the zenith for serious star-study, he ordered the instruments to be trained on the skyline.

“Hush, girl,” he said absently. “In a little I can show you moon-rise like you never saw it before.”

“But do you?” Embery persisted.

“With all the joint advantages that will flow from our alliance with his folk, why not?”

“Father says he doesn’t think the captain trusted us.”

“Just as long as that briq carried them home safely—and who’s to say she couldn’t if she lived out the awful storm which drove her here?—then you may rely on the powers of persuasion displayed by your young friend to bring more of their fleet here, and, if nothing else, the captain’s greed … Ah, thank you!”—to the senior apprentice for advising him that the first telescope was properly set. “Now, my dear, come here. Before moon-rise, because this direction is fairly clear, I’d like to show you what they used to call the New Star. Ever since, more than a score-of-score years ago—”

Embery stamped her pad. “Uncle, I’m not some ignorant youngling from the city school, you know!”

He blinked at her. “No need to be offensive, niece! Of course I know you’ve looked at it before, but I want to share a new discovery with you, and I don’t believe you’ve understood half the implications of what I’ve tried to teach you.”

“I have so!”

“Then tell me how the world can grow cooler even though the sun seems to be getting warmer—and I’ve worked out why!”

“For the same reason it’s better in full sunlight to have a light mantle than a dark one! Reflection!”

But Embery’s mood changed even before he could compliment her on a lesson well remembered, and she said, “You think you’ve worked out why? You never told me that! Go on!”

And she cuddled up alongside him much as she used to do when she was barely strong enough to stand upright, so that he had to lift her to the ocular of his telescopes.

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