The hobbies rocked swiftly toward one of the blocks and came to a halt before it. To one side I saw a gnome, or what appeared to be a gnome, a small, humpbacked, faintly humanoid creature that spun a dial set into the wall beside the slab of glowing stone.
“Captain, look!” cried Sara.
There was no need for her to cry out to me-and I had seen it almost as soon as she had. Upon the glowing stone appeared a scene-a faint and shadowed scene, as if it might be a place at the bottom of a clear and crystal sea, its colors subdued by the depth of water, its outlines shifting with the little wind ripples that ran on the water’s surface.
A raw and bleeding landscape, with red lands stretching to a mauve, storm-torn horizon, broken by crimson buttes, and in the foreground a clump of savage yellow flowers. But even as I tried to grasp all this, to relate it to the kind of world it might have been, it changed, and in its place was a jungle world, drowned in the green and purple of overwhelming vegetation, spotted by the flecks of screaming color that I knew were tropic flowers, and back of it all a sense of lurking bestiality that made my hide crawl even as I looked at it.
Then it, too, was gone-a glimpse and it was gone-and in its place was a yellow desert lighted by a moon and by a flare of stars that turned the sky to silver, with the lips of the marching sand dunes catching and fracturing the moon and starlight so that the dunes appeared to be foaming waves of water charging in upon the land.
The desert did not fade as the other places had. It came in a rush upon us and exploded in my face.
Beneath me I felt the violent plunging of a bucking Dobbin and made a frantic grab at the cantle of the saddle which seemed to have no cantle and then felt myself pitched forward and turning in the air.
I struck on one shoulder and skidded in the sand and finally came to rest, the breath knocked out of me. I struggled up, cursing-or trying to curse and failing, because I had no breath to curse with-and once on my feet, saw that we were alone in that land we had seen upon the glowing block.
Sara sprawled to one side of me and not far off Tuck was struggling to his feet, hampered by the cassock that had become entangled about his legs, and a little beyond Tuck, George was crawling on his hands and knees, whimpering like a pup that had been booted out of doors into a friendless. frigid night.
All about us lay the desert, desiccated, without a shred of vegetation, flooded by the great white moon and the thousand glowing stars, all shining like lamps in a cloudless sky.
“He’s gone!” George was whimpering as he crawled about. “I can’t hear him anymore. I have lost my friend.”
And that was not all that was lost. The city was lost and the planet on which the city stood. We were in another place. This was one trip, I told myself, that I never should have made. I had known it all along. I’d not believed in it, even from the start. And to make a go of it, you had to believe in everything you did. You had to have a reason for everything you did.
Although, I recalled, I had really no choice.
I had been committed from the moment I had seen that beauty of a spaceship standing on the field of Earth.
TWO
I had come sneaking back to Earth. Not back really, for I never had been there to start with. But Earth was where my money was and Earth was sanctuary and out in space I was fair game to anyone who found me. Not that what I had done had been actually so bad, nor was I to blame entirely, but there were a lot of people who had lost their shirts on it and, they were out to get me and eventually would get me if I failed to reach Earth’s sanctuary.
The ship that I was driving was a poor excuse-a fugitive from a junkyard (and that was exactly what it was), patched up and stuck together with binder twine and bailing wire, but I didn’t need it long. All I wanted of it was to get me to Earth. Once I stepped out of it, it could fall into a heap for all it mattered to me. Once I got to Earth, I’d be staying there.
I knew that Earth Patrol would be on watch for me-not that Earth cared; so far as Earth was concerned, the more the merrier. Rather a patrol to keep undesirable characters like myself from fleeing back to Earth.
So I came into the solar system with the Sun between myself and Earth and I hoped that my slide rule hadn’t slipped a notch and that I had it figured right. I piled on all the normal-space speed I could nurse out of the heap and the Sun’s gravity helped considerably and when I passed the Sun that ship was traveling like a hell-singed bat. There was an anxious hour when it seemed I might have sliced it just a bit too close. But the radiation screens held and I lost only half my speed and there was Earth ahead.
With all engines turned off and every circuit cut, I coasted on past Venus, no more than five million miles off to my left, and headed in for Earth.
The patrol didn’t spot me and it was sheer luck, of course, but there wasn’t much to spot. I had no energy output and all the electronics were doused and all they could have picked up was a mass of metal and fairly small, at that. And I came in, too, with the Sun behind me, and the solar radiations, no matter how good the equipment you may have, help louse up reception.
It was insane to try it, of course, and there were a dozen very nasty ways in which I could have failed, but on many a planet-hunting venture I had taken chances that were no less insane. The thing was that I made it.
There is just one spaceport on Earth. They don’t need any more. The traffic isn’t heavy. There are few people left on Earth; they all are out in space. The ones who are left are the hopeless sentimentalists who think there is status attached to living on the planet where the human race arose. They, and the ones like myself, are the only residents. The sentimentalists, I had heard, were a fairly snooty crowd of self-styled aristocrats, but that didn’t bother me. I wasn’t planning on having too much to do with them. Occasionally excursion ships dropped in with a load of pilgrims, back to visit the cradle of the race, and a few freighters bringing in assorted cargo, but that was all there was.
I brought in the ship and set it down and walked away from it, carrying my two bags, the only possessions I had been able to get away with before the vultures had come flocking in. The ship didn’t fall into a heap; it just stood there, its slab-sided self, the sorriest-looking vessel you ever clapped your eyes on.
Just two berths away from it stood this beauty of a ship. It gleamed with smart efficiency, slim and sleek, a
