—Hm-m-m. I guess you didn’t see Vandange’s accompanying letter. No, you haven’t, it wouldn’t’ve been plugged into your memory. Anyway, he claims his assistants examined that ship down to the bolt heads. And they found nothing, no mechanism, no peculiarity, whose function and behavior weren’t obvious. He really gets indignant. Says the notion of interspace-time transference is mathematically absurd. I don’t have quite his faith in mathematics, myself, but I must admit he has one common-sense point. If a ship could somehow flip from one entire cosmos to another… why, in five thousand years of interstellar travel, haven’t we gotten some record of it happening?”
“Perhaps the ships to which it occurs never come back.”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps the whole argument is due to misunderstanding. We don’t have any good grasp of the Kirkasanter language. Or maybe it’s a hoax. That’s Vandange’s opinion. He claims there’s no such region as they say they come from. Not anywhere. Neither astronomers nor explorers have ever found anything like a… a space like a shining fog, crowded with stars—”
“But why should these wayfarers tell a falsehood?”
“I don’t know. Nobody does. That’s why the Serievan government decided it’d better ask for a Ranger.”
Laure jumped up and started pacing again. He was a tall young man, with the characteristic beardlessness, fair hair and complexion, slightly slanted blue eyes of the Fireland mountaineers on New Vixen. But since he had trained at Starborough, which is on Aladir not far from Irontower City, he affected a fashionably simple gray tunic and blue hose. The silver comet of his calling blazoned his left breast.
“I don’t know,” he repeated. There rose in him a consciousness of that immensity which crouched beyond this hull. “Maybe they are telling the sober truth. We don’t dare not know.”
When a mere few million people have an entire habitable world to themselves, they do not often build high. That comes later, along with formal wilderness preservation, disapproval of fecundity, and inducements to emigrate. Pioneer towns tend to be low and rambling. (Or so it is in that civilization wherein the Commonalty operates. We know that other branches of humanity have their distinctive ways, and hear rumors of yet stranger ones. But so vast is the galaxy—these two or three spiral arms, a part of which our race has to date thinly occupied—so vast, that we cannot even keep track of our own culture, let alone anyone else’s.)
Pelogard, however, was founded on an island off the Branzan mainland, above Serieve’s arctic circle: which comes down to almost 56°. Furthermore, it was an industrial center. Hence most of its buildings were tall and crowded. Laure, standing by the outer wall of Ozer Vandange’s office and looking forth across the little city, asked why this location had been chosen.
“You don’t know?” responded the physicist. His inflection was a touch too elaborately incredulous.
“I’m afraid not,” Laure confessed. “Think how many systems my service has to cover, and how many individual places within each system. If we tried to remember each, we’d never be anywhere but under the neuroinductors.”
Vandange, seated small and bald and prim behind a large desk, pursed his lips. “Yes, yes,” he said. “Nevertheless, I should not think an
Laure flushed. An experienced Ranger would have put this conceited old dustbrain in his place. But he himself was too aware of youth and awkwardness. He managed to say quietly, “Sir, my ship has complete information. She needed only scan it and tell me no precautions were required here. You have a beautiful globe and I can understand why you’re proud of it. But please understand that to me it has to be a way station. My job is with those people from Kirkasant, and I’m anxious to meet them.”
“You shall, you shall,” said Vandange, somewhat mollified. “I merely thought a conference with you would be advisable first. As for your question, we need a city here primarily because updwelling ocean currents make the arctic waters mineral-rich. Extractor plants pay off better than they would farther south.”
Despite himself, Laure was interested. “You’re getting your minerals from the sea already? At so early a stage of settlement?”
“This sun and its planets are poor in heavy metals. Most local systems are. Not surprising. We aren’t far, here, from the northern verge of the spiral arm. Beyond is the halo—thin gas, little dust, ancient globular clusters very widely scattered. The interstellar medium from which stars form has not been greatly enriched by earlier generations.”
Laure suppressed his resentment at being lectured like a child. Maybe it was just! Vandange’s habit. He cast another glance through the wall. The office was high in one of the buildings. He looked across soaring blocks of metal, concrete, glass, and plastic, interlinked with trafficways and freight cables, down to the waterfront. There bulked the extractor plants, warehouses: and sky-docks. Cargo craft moved ponderously in and out. Not many, passenger vessels flitted between. Pelogard must be largely automated.
The season stood at late spring. The sun cast brightness across a gray ocean that a wind rumpled. Immense flocks of seabirds dipped and wheeled. Or were they birds? They had wings, anyhow; steely blue against a wan sky. Perhaps they cried or sang, into the wind skirl and wave rush; but Laure couldn’t hear it in this enclosed place.
“That’s one, reason I can’t accept their yarn,” Vandange declared.
“Eh?” Laure came out of his reverie with a start. Vandange pressed a button to opaque the wall. “Sit down. Let’s get to business.”
Laure eased himself into a lounger opposite the desk. “Why am I conferring with you?” he counterattacked. “Whoever was principally working with the Kirkasanters had to be a semanticist. In short, Paeri Ferand. He consulted specialists on your university faculty, in anthropology, history, and so forth. But I should think your own role as a physicist was marginal. Yet you’re the one taking up my time. Why?”
“Oh, you can see Ferand and the others as much as you choose,” Vandange said. “You won’t get more from them than repetitions of what the Kirkasanters have already told. How could you? What else have they got to go on? If nothing else, an underpopulated world like ours can’t maintain staffs of experts to ferret out the meaning of every datum, every inconsistency, every outright lie. I had hoped, when our government notified your section, headquarters, the Rangers would have sent a real team, instead of—” He curbed himself. “Of course, they have many other claims on their attention. They would not see at once how important this is.”
“Well,” Laure said in his annoyance, “if you’re suspicious, if you think the strangers need further investigation, why bother with my office? It’s just an overworked little outpost. Send them on to a heart world, like Sarnac, where the facilities and people really can be had.”
“It was urged,” Vandange said. “I, and a few others who felt as ‘I’ do, fought the proposal bitterly. In the end,’ as a compromise, the government decided to dump the whole problem in the lap of the Rangers. Who turn out to be, in effect, you. Now I must persuade you to be properly cautious. Don’t you see, if those… beings… have some, hostile intent, the very worst move would be to send them on—let them spy out our civilization—let them, perhaps, commit nuclear sabotage on a vital center, and then vanish back into space.” His voice grew shrill. “That’s why we’ve kept them here so long, on one excuse after the next, here on our home planet. We feel responsible to the rest of mankind!”
“But what—” Laure shook his head. He felt a sense of unreality. “Sir, the League, the troubles, the Empire, its fall, the Long Night… every such thing—behind us. In space and time alike. The people of the Commonalty don’t get into wars.”
“Are you quite certain?”
“What makes
“The fact that they are liars.”
Vandange sat awhile, gnawing his thumb, before he opened a box, took out a cigar and puffed it into lighting. He didn’t offer Laure one. That might be for fear of poisoning his visitor with whatever local weed he was smoking. Scattered around for many generations on widely differing planets, populations did develop some odd distributions of allergy and immunity. But Laure suspected plain rudeness.
“I thought my letter made it clear,” Vandange said. “They insist they are from another continuum. One with impossible properties, including visibility from ours. Conveniently on the far side of the Dragon’s Head, so that we don’t see it here. Oh, yes,” he added quickly, “I’ve heard the arguments. That the whole thing is a misunderstanding
