Ross scowled. “Because”—his patience was exaggerated to the point of insult—”we have only one peep-probe. Once it’s set we can’t tear it down easily for transport somewhere else, so we want to be sure there’s something to look at beyond.”
She began to wring the water out of her long hair. “Well, as far as we’ve explored . . . nothing. Come yourself next time. Tino-rau and Taua aren’t particular; they like company.”
Putting two fingers to her mouth, Karara whistled. Twin heads popped out of the water, facing the shore and her. Projecting noses, mouths with upturned corners so they curved in a lasting pleasant grin at the mammals on the shore—the dolphin pair, mammals whose ancestors had chosen the sea, whistled back in such close counterfeit of the girl’s signal that they could be an echo of her call. Years earlier their species’ intelligence had surprised, almost shocked, men. Experiments, training, co-operation, had developed a tie which gave the water-limited race of mankind new eyes, ears, minds, to see, evaluate, and report concerning an element in which the bipeds were not free.
Hand in hand with that co-operation had gone other experiments. Just as the clumsy armored diving suits of the early twentieth century had allowed man to begin penetration into a weird new world, so had scuba equipment made him still freer in the sea. And now the gill-pack which separated the needed oxygen from the water made even that lighter burden of tanks obsolete. But there remained depths into which man could not descend outside a submarine whose secrets were closed to him. There the dolphins operated, in a partnership of minds, equal minds—though that last fact had been difficult for man to accept.
Ross’s irritation, unjustified as he knew it to be, did not rest on Tino-rau or Taua. He enjoyed the hours when he buckled on gill-pack and took to the sea with those two ten-foot, black-and-silver escorts sharing the action. But Karara . . . Karara’s presence was a different matter altogether.
The Agents’ teams had always been strictly masculine. Two men partnered for an interlocking of abilities and temperaments, going through training together, becoming two halves of a strong and efficient whole. Before being summarily recruited into the Project, Ross had been a loner—living on the ragged edges of the law, an indigestible bit for the civilization which had become too ordered and “adjusted” to absorb his kind. But in the Project he had discovered others like himself—men born out of time, too ruthless, too individualistic for their own age, but able to operate with ease in the dangerous paths of the Time Agents.
And when the time search for the wrecked alien ships had succeeded and the first intact ship found, used, duplicated, the Agents had come from forays into the past to be trained anew for travel to the stars. First there had been Ross Murdock, criminal. Then there had been Ross Murdock and Gordon Ashe, Time Agents. Now there was still Ross and Gordon and a quest as perilous as any they had known. Yet this time they had to depend upon Karara and the dolphins.
“Tomorrow”—Ross was still not sorting out his thoughts, though aware of prickly feelings sharp as embedded thorns—”I will come.”
“Good!” If she recognized his hostility for what it was, that did not bother her. Once more she whistled to the dolphins, waved a casual farewell with one hand, and headed up the beach toward the base camp. Ross chose a more rugged path over the cliff.
Suppose they did not find what they sought near here? Yet the old taped map suggested that this was approximately the site starred upon it. Marking a city? A star port?
Ashe had volunteered for Hawaika, demanded this job after the disastrous Topaz affair when the team of Apache volunteers had been sent out too soon to counter what might have been a sneak settlement planted by Greater Russia. Ross was still unhappy over the ensuing months when only Major Kelgarries and maybe, in a lesser part, Ross had kept Gordon Ashe in the Project at all. That Topaz had been a failure was accepted when the settlement ship did not return. And that had added to Ashe’s sense of guilt for having recruited and partially trained the lost team.
Among those dispatched over Ashe’s vehement protests had been Travis Fox who had shared with Ashe and Ross the first galactic flight in an age-old derelict spaceship. Travis Fox—the Apache archaeologist—had he ever reached Topaz? Or would he and his team wander forever between worlds? Did they set down on a planet where some inimical form of native life or a Russian settlement had awaited them? The very uncertainty of their fate continued to ride Ashe.
So he insisted on coming out with the second settlement team, the volunteers of Samoan and Hawaiian descent, to carry on an even more exciting and hazardous exploration. Just as the Project had probed into the past of Earth, so would Ashe and Ross now attempt to discover what lay in the past of Hawaika, to see this world as it had been at the height of the galactic civilization, and so to learn what they could about their fore-runners into space. And the mystery they had dropped into upon landing added to the necessity for those discoveries.
Their probe, if fortune favored them, might become a gate through time. The installation was a vast improvement over the kind of passage points they had first devised. Technical information had taken a vast leap forward after human engineers and scientists had had access to the tapes of the interstellar empire. Adaptations and shortcuts developed, so that a new hybrid technology came into use, woven from the knowledge and experimentation of two civilizations thousands of years apart in time.
If and when he or Ashe—or Karara and her dolphins—discovered the proper site, the two Agents could set up their own experiment. Both Ross and Ashe had had enough drill in the process. All they needed was the brick of discovery; then they could build their wall. But they must find some remainder of the past, some slight trace of ancient ruin upon which to center their peep-probe. And since landing here long days had flowed into weeks with no such discovery being made.
Ross crossed the ridge of rock which formed a cockscomb rise on the island’s spine and descended to the village. As they had been trained, the Polynesian settlers adapted local products to their own heritage of building and tools. It was necessary that they live off the land, for their transport ship had had storage space only for a limited number of supplies and tools. After it took off to return home they would be wholly on their own for several years. Their ship, a silvery ball, rested on a rock ledge, its pilot and crew having lingered to learn the results of Ashe’s search. Four days more and they would have to lift for home even if the Agents still had only negative results to report.
That disappointment was driving Ashe, the way that six months earlier his outrage and guilt over the Topaz affair had driven him. Karara’s suggestion carried weight the longer Ross thought about it. With more swimmers hunting, there was just that much increased chance of turning up some clue. So far the dolphins had not reported any dangerous native sea life or any perils except the natural ones any diver always had at his shoulder under the waves.
There were extra gill-packs, and all of the settlers were good swimmers. An organized hunt ought to shake the Polynesians out of their present do-it-tomorrow attitude. As long as they had definite work before them—the unloading of the ship, the building of the village, all the labors incidental to the establishing of this base—they had shown energy and enthusiasm. It was only during the last couple of weeks that the languor which appeared part of the atmosphere here had crept up on them, so that now they were content to live at a slower and lazier pace. Ross remembered Ashe’s comparison made the evening before, likening Hawaika to a legendary island on Earth where the inhabitants lived a drugged existence, feeding upon the seeds of a native plant. Hawaika was fast becoming a lotus land for humans.
“Through here, then westward . . .” Ashe hunched over the crate table in the mat-walled house. He did not look up as Ross entered. Karara’s still damp head was bowed until those black locks, now sleeked to her round skull, almost touched the man’s close-cropped brown hair. They were both studying a map as if they saw not lines on paper but the actual inlets and lagoons which that drawing represented.
“You are sure, Gordon, that this is the modern point to match the site on the tape?” The girl brushed back straying hair.
Ashe shrugged. There were tight lines about his mouth that had not been there six months ago. He moved jerkily, not with the fluid grace of those old days when he had faced the vast distance of time travel with unruffled calm and self-confidence to steady the novice Ross.