They fastened down their helmets and walked toward the door.
'I will walk with you to your ship,' said the old man. 'I do not walk a great deal now, for the cold and the thin air bother me. I must be getting old.”
Their feet whispered through the sand and the wind keened above the desert, a shrill-voiced wind that played an eternal overture for the stage of desolation old Earth had become.
'I live with ghosts,' said the old man as they walked toward the ship.
'Ghosts of men and events and great ideals that built a mighty race.
'Probably you wonder that I resemble a man so much. Perhaps you thought that men, in time to come, would evolve into specialized monstrosities — great, massive brains that had lost the power of locomotion, or bundles of emotional reactions, unstable as the very wind, or foolish philosophers, or, worse yet, drab realists. But we became none of these things. We kept our balance. We kept our feet on the ground when dreams filled our heads.”
They reached the ship and stood before the opened outer valve.
The old man waved a hand toward the mighty metal building.
'The proudest city Man ever built,' he said. 'A city whose fame spread to the far stars, to distant galaxies. A city that travelers told about in bated whispers. A place to which came the commerce of many solar systems, ships from across far inter-galactic space. But now it is crumbling into dust and ruin. Soon the desert will claim it and the wind will sing a death dirge for it and little, furry animals will burrow in its bones.”
He turned to them and Gary saw a half-mystic light shining in his eyes.
'Thus it is with cities,' he said, 'but Man is different. Man marches on and on. He outgrows cities and builds others. He outgrows planets. He is creating a heritage, a mighty heritage that in time will make him the master of the universe.
'But there will be interludes of defeat. Times when it seems that all is lost — that Man will slip again to the primal savagery and ignorance. Times when the way seems too hard and the price too great to pay. But always there will be bugles in the sky and a challenge on the horizon and the bright beckoning of ideals far away. And Man will go ahead, to greater triumphs, always pushing back the frontiers, always moving up and outward.”
The old man turned around and headed back toward the doorway in the building. He went without a word of farewell and his sandaled feet left a tiny, ragged trail across the shifting sand.
Chapter Thirteen
The black tunnel of the space-time wheel ended and the ship was in normal space again. Normal, but not right.
Gary, hunched over the controls, heard Caroline's quick gasp of surprise.
'There's something wrong!' she cried.
There was a world, but it was not the planet of the Engineers. No great city grew upon it from horizon to horizon. Instead of three blue suns, there was one and it was very large and red, a dull brick red, and its rays were so feeble that one could stare straight into it and at the edges it seemed that one could see straight through the fringe of gases.
There was no Hellhounds fleet, no flashing ships of the defender… no war.
There was peace upon this world… a quiet and deadly peace. The peace, thought Gary, of the never-was, the peace of all-is-over.
It was a flat splotched world with a leprous look about it, not gray, but colored as a child with water paints might color a paint book page when he was tired and all the need of accuracy and art were things to be forgotten.
Something happened, Gary told himself. And he felt the chill of fear in his veins.
Something happened and here we are — in what strange corner of the universe?
'Something went wrong,' Caroline said again. 'Some inherent weakness in the co-ordinates, some streak of instability in the mathematics themselves, perhaps.”
'More likely,' Gary told her, 'the fault lies in the human brain — or in the brain of the Engineer. No man, no being, can see far enough ahead, think so clearly that be will foresee each eventuality. And even if he did, he might be inclined to let some small factor slip by with no other thought than that it was so small it could do no harm.”
Caroline nodded at him. 'The mistakes creep in so easy,' she admitted.
'Like mice… mice running in the mind.”
'We can turn around and go back,' said Gary, but even as he said it he knew that it was no good. For if the tunnel of distorted time-space through which they had come was jiggered out of position at this end, it would be out of focus at the other end as well.
'But we can't,' said Caroline.
'I know we can't,' said Gary. 'I spoke too quickly. Without thinking.”
'We can't even try,' said Caroline. 'The wheel is gone.' He saw that she was right. The wheel of light was no longer in the sky. It had snuffed out and they were here alone.
Here? he asked. And where was here?
There was a simple answer. They simply did not know. At the moment, there was no way of telling.
'Lost,' said Caroline. 'Like the babes in the woods. The robins came, you remember, and covered them with leaves.”
The ship was gliding down toward the planet and Gary swung around to the controls again.
'We'll look it over,' he said.
'There may be someone there,' said Caroline.
Someone, Gary thought, was not quite the word. Something would be more like it. Something.
The planet was flat, a world without mountains, without rivers, without seas. There were great green bogs instead of seas and flat arid plains with splotches of color that might be vegetation or might be no more than the outcropping of different geological strata.
The ship took up its descent spiral and Gary and Caroline hung close above the visor, watching for some sign of habitation, for some hint of life. A road, perhaps. Or a building. Or a vehicle moving on the ground or in the air. But there was nothing.
Finally Gary shook his head. 'There's nothing here,' he said. 'We might as well go down. One place on this planet is as good as any other.”
They landed on a flat expanse of sand between the shore of one of the green bogs and the edge of a patch of splotched vegetation, for by now it was apparent that the color spots on the planet's surface were vegetation of a sort.
'Toadstools,' said Caroline, looking out the vision plate. 'Toadstools and that other kind of funny stuff, like asparagus spears, only it's not asparagus.”
'Like something out of a goblin book,' said Gary.
Like something that you thought about when you were a kid and couldn't go to sleep after grandmother had read you some story about a shivery place and you had pulled the covers up over your head and listened for the footsteps to start coming through the dark.
They made the tests and the planet was livable without their suits — slightly high in oxygen, a little colder and a slighter gravity than Earth, but livable.
'Let's go out,' said Gary, gruffly, 'and have a look around.”
'Gary, you sound as if you might be scared.”
'I am,' he admitted. 'Pink with purple spots.”
The silence smote them as they stepped outside the ship. An awesome and abiding silence that was louder than a shattering sound.
There was no sound of wind, and no sound of water. No song of birds. No grass to rustle.
The great red sun hung in the sky above them and their shadows were soft and fuzzy on the sand, the faint, fugitive shadows of a cloudy day.
On one hand lay the stagnant pools of water and the hummocks of slimy vegetation that formed the bog and
