“We’ll check in with you as soon as we get back and get our shoonoon put away. We understand what’s motivating these frenzies, now, and in about twenty-five to thirty hours we’ll be able to start doing something about it.”
The general, in the screen, grimaced.
“That’s a long time, Mr. Gilbert. Longer than we can afford to take, I’m afraid. You’re not cruising at full speed now, are you?”
“Oh, no, general. We’re just trying to keep Alpha level on the horizon.” He thought for a moment. “We don’t need to keep down to that. It may make an even bigger impression if we speed up.”
He went back to the observation deck, picked up the P.A.-phone, and called for attention.
“You have seen, now, that we can travel around the world, so fast that we keep up with the Sky Fire and it is not seen to set. Now we will travel even faster, and I will show you a new wonder. I will show you the Sky Fire rising in the west; it and the Always-Same will seem to go backward in the sky. This will not be for real; it will only be seen so because we will be traveling faster. Watch, now, and see.” He called the bridge for full speed, and then told them to look at the Sky-Fire and then see in the screens where it stood over Bluelake.
That was even better; now they were racing with the Sky-Fire and catching up to it. After half an hour he left them still excited and whooping gleefully over the steady gain. Five hours later, when he came back after a nap and a hasty breakfast, they were still whooping. Edith Shaw was excited, too; the shoonoon were trying to estimate how soon they would be back to Bluelake by comparing the position of the Sky Fire with its position in the screen.
General Maith received them in his private office at Army H.Q.; Foxx Travis mixed drinks for the four of them while the general checked the microphones to make sure they had privacy.
“I blame myself for not having forced martial rule on them hundreds of hours ago,” he said. “I have three brigades; the one General Gonzales had here originally, and the two I brought with me when I took over here. We have to keep at least half a brigade in the south, to keep the tribes there from starting any more forest fires. I can’t hold Bluelake with anything less than half a brigade. Gonzales has his hands full in his area. He had a nasty business while you were off on that world cruise—natives in one village caught the men stationed there off guard and wiped them out, and then started another frenzy. It spread to two other villages before he got it stopped. And we need the Third Brigade in the northeast; there are three quarters of a million natives up there, inhabiting close to a million square miles. And if anything really breaks loose here, and what’s been going on in the last few days is nothing even approaching what a real outbreak could be like, we’ll have to pull in troops from everywhere. We must save the Terran-type crops and the carniculture plants. If we don’t, we all starve.”
Miles nodded. There wasn’t anything he could think of saying to that.
“How soon can you begin to show results with those shoonoon, Mr. Gilbert?” the general asked. “You said from twenty-five to thirty hours. Can you cut that any? In twenty-five hours, all hell could be loose all over the continent.”
Miles shook his head. “So far, I haven’t accomplished anything positive,” he said. “All I did with this trip around the world was convince them that I was telling the truth when I told them there was no Dark Place under the World, where Alpha and Beta go at night.” He hastened, as the general began swearing, to add: “I know, that doesn’t sound like much. But it was necessary. I have to convince them that there will be no Last Hot Time, and then—”
The shoonoon, on their drum-shaped cushions, stared at him in silence, aghast. All the happiness over the wonderful trip in the ship, when they had chased the Sky Fire around the World and caught it over Bluelake, and even their pleasure in the frozen delicacies they had just eaten, was gone.
“No—Last—Hot—Time?”
“Mailsh Heelbare, this is not real! It cannot be!”
“The Gone Ones—”
“The Always-Cool Time, when there will be no more hunger or hard work or death; it cannot be real that this will never come!”
He rose, holding up his hands; his action stopped the clamor.
“Why should the Gone Ones want to return to this poor world that they have gladly left?” he asked. “Have they not a better place in the middle of the Sky Fire, where it is always cool? And why should you want them to come back to this world? Will not each one of you pass, sooner or later, to the middle of the Sky Fire; will you not there be given new bodies and join the Gone Ones? There is the Always-Cool; there the crops grow without planting and without the work of women; there the game come into the villages to be killed in the gathering-places, without hunting. There you will talk with the other Gone Ones, your fathers and your fathers’ fathers, as I talk with you. Why do you think this must come to the World of People? Can you not wait to join the Gone Ones in the Sky Fire?”
Then he sat down and folded his arms. They were looking at him in amazement; evidently they all saw the logic, but none of them had ever thought of it before. Now they would have to turn it over in their
