Basically, back on Terra, they had all been among the most progressive of their people—progressive, that is, in the white man’s sense of the word. Travis had a fleeting recognition of his now oblique way of thinking. He, too, had been marked by the Redax. They had all been educated in the modern fashion and all possessed a spirit of adventure which marked them over their fellows. They had volunteered for the team and successfully passed the tests to weed out the temperamentally unfit or fainthearted. But all that was before Redax …
Why had they been submitted to that? And why this flight? What had pushed Dr. Ashe and Murdock and Colonel Kelgarries, time agents he knew and trusted, into dispatching them without warning to Topaz? Something had happened, something which had given Dr. Ruthven ascendancy over those others and had started them on this wild trip.
Travis was conscious of a stir about the firelit circle. The men were rising, moving back into the shadows, stretching out on the blankets they had found among other stores on the ship. They had discovered weapons there—knives, bows, quivers of arrows, all of which they had been trained to use in the intensive schooling of the project and which needed no more repair than they themselves could give. And the rations they carried were field supplies, few of them. Tomorrow they must begin hunting in earnest …
“Why has this thing been done to us?” Buck was beside Travis, those quiet eyes sliding past him to seek the fire once more. “I do not think you were told when the rest of us were not—”
Travis seized upon that. “There are those who say that I knew, agreed?”
“That is so. Once we stood at the same place in time—in our thoughts, our desires. Now we stand at many places, as if we climbed a stairway, each at his own speed—a stairway the Pinda-lick-o-yi has set us upon. Some here, some there, some yet farther above …” He sketched a series of step outlines in the air. “And in this there is trouble—”
“The truth,” Travis agreed. “Yet it is also true that I knew nothing of this, that I climb with you on these stairs.”
“So I believe. But there comes a time when it is best not to be a woman stirring a pot of boiling stew but rather one who stands quietly at a distance—”
“You mean?” Travis pressed.
“I say that alone among us you have crossed the stars before, therefore new things are not so hard to understand. And we need a scout. Also the coyotes run in your footsteps, and you do not fear them.”
It made good sense. Let him scout ahead of the party, taking the coyotes with him. Stay away from the camp for a while and speak small—until the people on Buck’s stairway were more closely united.
“I go in the morning,” Travis agreed. He could slip away tonight, but just now he could not force himself away from the fire, from the companionship.
“You might take Tsoay with you,” Buck continued.
Travis waited for him to enlarge on that suggestion. Tsoay was one of the youngest of their group, Buck’s own cross-cousin and near-brother.
“It is well,” Buck explained, “that we learn this land, and it has always been our custom that the younger walk in the footprints of the older. Also, not only should trails be learned, but also men.”
Travis caught the thought behind that. Perhaps by taking the younger men as scouts, one after another, he could build up among them a following of sorts. Among the Apaches, leadership was wholly a matter of personality. Until the reservation days, chieftains had gained their position by force of character alone, though they might come successively from one family clan over several generations.
He did not want the chieftainship here. No, but neither did he want growing whispers working about him to cut him off from his people. To every Apache severance from the clan was a little death. He must have those who would back him if Deklay, or those who thought like Deklay, turned grumbling into open hostility.
“Tsoay is one quick to learn,” Travis agreed. “We go at dawn—”
“Along the mountain range?” Buck inquired.
“If we seek a protected place for the rancheria, yes. The mountains have always provided good strongholds for the People.”
“And you think there is need for a fort?”
Travis shrugged. “I have been one day’s journey out into this world. I saw nothing but animals. But that is no promise that elsewhere there are no enemies. The planet was on the tapes we brought back from that other world, and so it was known to the others who once rode between star and star as we rode between ranch and town. If they had this world set on a journey tape, it was for a reason; that reason may still be in force.”
“Yet it was long ago that these star people rode so …” Buck mused. “Would the reason last so long?”
Travis remembered two other worlds, one of weird desert inhabited by beast things—or had they once been human, human to the point of possessing intelligence?—that had come out of sand burrows at night to attack a spaceship. And the second world where the ruins of a giant city had stood choked with jungle vegetation, where he had made a blowgun from tubes of rustless metal as a weapon gift for small winged men—but were they men? Both had been remnants of that ancient galactic empire.
“Some things could so remain,” he answered soberly. “If we find them, we must be careful. But first a good site for the rancheria.”
“There is no return to home for us,” Buck stated flatly.
“Why do you say that? There could be a rescue ship
