them. It showed a wall of metal, bright as a new mirror and straight for a hundred feet or so horizontally, but rising vertically in a convex curve.
There were openings in the wall. Windows, ports, a door, a hatchway, who knew the right words? It was not a wall. It was the side and flank of a ship.
Men came out of it. They wore strange clothing, and they spoke a strange tongue. They moved forward, and Rolf and the driver and Neil Banning walked to meet them. Presently they stopped in the full glare of the light. The strange men spoke to Rolf, and he answered them, and then Banning realized in a dim and distant way that the men were all looking at him and that in their faces was a reverence almost approaching superstition.
He heard them say, “The Valkar!” And as far off as he was, he felt a small, faint shiver touch him at the fierce and hopeful and wild and half-despairing tone in which they said it.
Rolf led him toward the open hatchway of the ship. He said quietly, “You asked me where I was taking you. Come aboard, Kyle — I'm taking you home.'
CHAPTER III
The room in which Neil Banning found himself was larger and more sumptuous than the jail cell, but it was none the less a prison. He found that out as soon as full consciousness returned to him — he had a feeling he had passed out again, and for quite some time, but be could not be sure about this. Anyway, he had got up and tried the doors. One led into an adjoining bath, rather oddly appointed. The other was locked. Tight. There were no windows. The metal wall was smooth and unbroken. Light in the room came from some overhead source he could not see.
For a few minutes he prowled uneasily, looking at things, trying to think. He remembered the weird nightmarish dream he had had about the light on the prairie and the great silver ship. Nightmare, of course. Some hypnotic vision induced by the dark man who called himself Rolf. Who in the devil's name was Rolf, and why had the man picked him as the victim of his insane behavior?
A ship, in the middle of the prairie. The men in the strange clothes, who had hailed him as — what was the name again? Valkar. A dream, of course. Vivid, but only a dream—
Or was it?
No windows. No sense of motion. No sound — yes, there was a sound, or almost one, if you let your whole body listen for it. A deep throbbing, like the beating of a giant's heart. The air had an unfamiliar smell.
With senses suddenly sharpened to an abnormal acuteness, Banning realized that everything in the room was unfamiliar. The colors, the textures, the shapes, everything from the plumbing fixtures to the furnishings of the bunk bed he had just left.
Even his own body felt unfamiliar. The weight of it had changed.
He began to pound on the door and yell.
Rolf came almost at once. The man who had driven the car was with him, and now they both carried the egg-shaped metal things. The ex-driver bowed to Banning, but he stayed several paces behind Rolf, so that Banning could not possibly attack or evade both of them at once. They now wore clothing such as the men had worn in Banning's dream, a sort of tunic and closefitting leggings that looked comfortable and functional and quite unreal.
Rolf entered the room, leaving the other man outside. Banning caught a glimpse of a narrow corridor walled in metal like the room, and then Rolf shut the door again. Banning heard it lock.
'Where are we?” he demanded.
'At the moment,” said Rolf, “we're well out from Sol on our way to Antares. I don't think the exact readings would mean much to you.'
Banning said, ‘I don't believe you.” He didn't. And yet, at the same time he knew, somehow, that it was true. The knowledge was horrible, and his brain twisted and turned like a hunted rabbit to get away from it.
Rolf walked over to the outer wall. “Kyle,” he said, “you must start to believe me. Both our lives depend on it.'
He pressed a stud somewhere in the wall, and a section of the metal slid back, revealing a port.
'This isn't really a window,” Rolf said. “It's a viewplate, a very complex and clever electronic setup that reproduces a true picture of what ordinary sight couldn't see.'
Banning looked. Beyond the port was stunning darkness and light. The darkness was a depthless void into which his mind seemed to be falling, tumbling and screaming through drear infinities, disoriented, lost. But the light—
He looked upon a million million suns. The familiar constellations were lost, their outlines drowned in the glittering ocean of stars. They crashed in upon him like thunder, he fell and fell in an abyss of ray and darkness, he—
Banning put his hands over his eyes and turned away. He fell down on the bunk and lay there shuddering. Rolf closed the port.
'You believe me now?'
Banning groaned.
'Good,” said Rolf. “You believe in a starship. Then you have logically to believe in a civilization capable of producing a starship, and a type of culture in which a starship is both useful and necessary.'
Banning sat up in the bunk, still sick and shaky and clinging to its comforting solidity. He knew it was hopeless, but he advanced his final negative argument.
'We're not moving. If we're going faster than light — and that's impossible in itself, according to what little science I know — there ought to be some feeling of acceleration.'
'The drive is not mechanical,” Rolf said, standing where he could watch Banning's face. “Its a field-type force, and since we're part of the field we are, in effect, at rest. So there's no sense of motion. As to possibility—” He grinned. “While I was on Earth, searching for you, I was amused to note the first crack in that limiting-speed theory. A research physicist clocked some particles moving faster than light, and the apologetic explanations that they were only photons and had no mass is merely evading the question.'
Banning cried incredulously, “But a civilization of starships, whose people come and go to Earth — and yet nobody on Earth knows about it — it's impossible'
'That,” said Rolf dryly, “is Earth egotism talking. Earth is a fringe world, and in some ways a damn retarded one. Politically, it's a mess — fifty different nations quarrelling and cutting each other's throats. The New Empire avoids open contact with such worlds. It just isn't worth the trouble.'
'All right,” said Banning. He made a gesture of defeat. “I'll accept the starship, the civilization, the — what did you call it? — New Empire. But where do I come into all this?'
'You're part of it. A very important — I might even say pivotal — part of it.'
'You have the wrong man,’ said Banning wearily. “I told you, my name is Neil Banning, I was born in Greenville, Nebraska—'
He stopped, and Rolf laughed. “You were having a pretty hard time proving that. No. You're Kyle Valkar, and you were born at Katuun, the old King City on the fourth world of Antares.'
'But my memories — my whole life on Earth!'
'False memories,” said Rolf. “The scientists of the New Empire are experts in mental techniques, and Jommor is the best of them. When Earth was chosen as your place of exile, and you were brought there, a captive, with your own memory already blanked out, Jommor compiled a life history for you, synthesized from the minds of the natives. When it was implanted carefully in your mind, and you were set free with a new name, a new speech, a new life, Kyle Valkar was gone forever, and there was only the Earthman Neil Banning no longer a menace to anyone.'
Banning said slowly, “Menace?'
'Oh, yes.” Rolf's eyes blazed suddenly with a savage light. “You're a Valkar, the last of them. And the Valkars have always been a menace to the usurpers of the New Empire.'
He began to move about nervously, as though the excitement he had in him was more than he could control. Banning stared at him blankly. He had had too many shocks, too close together, and things were just not registering
