desert campfires, studying them as you’d study a new neighbor who comes knocking at your door, the neighbor you fear at first and are never quite sure of until you really get to know and like him.
You see, we had so much to offer one another. A young race, constructive, brawling, shouting its defiance to the stars. And an old race, imaginative, sensitive, heirs to a civilization on the wane, but needing just a few Steves to make it young and great again.
I’d picked Steve because he was one of the shining ones of Earth. I’d known from the start that persuading him to wed a Martian woman would take plenty of doing.
Earthians are funny that way. Love to them is a complex thing, a web that has to be skillfully woven right from the start. Beauty alone isn’t enough. You have to say to them: “You’ll never hold that woman in your arms. Can’t you see how hopeless it is?”
Then the iron goes deep. If a love flies straight in the teeth of despair and comes out all right in the end, it will be as strong as death.
So I’d arranged for Steve to stumble on the mirror, to pick up that two-way televisual circuit into a very special paradise for two. And I’d opposed and warned him just to make sure he’d think of himself as a man facing hopeless odds to win through to an undying love.
On the other side it was easier. Azala had fallen in love with Steve before we put her on the other end of that televisual circuit. But seeing him wounded and in need of her had turned it into what Earthians call a great love.
Perhaps Earthians would someday smash the aura that had flamed about the heads of the Martian rulers for fifty thousand years.
I’d done my best to smash it. I had gone simply and humbly among Earthians, seeking a fresh wind to trundle the cinders of a dying culture.
I dreamed of Martians and Earthians standing equal and strong and proud, hands linked in friendship, cemented by bonds of kinship, separated by no gulfs such as now yawned before me, separating me from Steve.
I wanted to shout: “Good luck, Steve, Azala. You’re good kids and you deserve the best.”
Then I remembered that Steve was nearly forty, not quite a kid by Earthian standards. But, looking at Azala, I was pretty sure that Steve still had his best years ahead of him.
I wanted to go up to him and shake his hand for the last time. But now the hands of my people were tugging at my shoulders, stripping off the Earthian garments I’d worn so long with scant respect for my desire to be as human and regular as the next guy.
They got the suit off, and then I saw the old familiar cloak, purple and billowing out with shimmering star images, and I shuddered a little because I knew I’d never really feel at ease wearing it from that moment on.
They got me into the cloak and they bent down and straightened the stiff imperial folds and I was suddenly bored and deathly weary.
A chill wind from the stars seemed to blow over me, but I stood straight and still, and allowed them to fasten on the cloak the great glowing jewel I’d worn from childhood.
Steve saw me then. He was sitting up very straight, his hand on Azala’s tumbled, red-gold hair, and I heard him say: “Holy smoke.”
I stared down at the jewel, blazing and shuddering and shivering in the desert air, and I shut my eyes tight, wishing for the first time in my life that it did not proclaim me Tulan Sharm, the Glorious One, Temporal Ruler of the Seven Cities before Whom the Stars Bowed.
The Timeless Ones
“There will be a great many changes, Ned,” Cynthia Jackson said. She stared out the viewport at the little green world which the contact rocket Star Mist was swiftly approaching on warp-drive.
Her husband copilot nodded, remembering Clifton and Helen Sweeney, and the Sweeney youngsters. Remembering with a smile Tommy Sweeney’s kite-flying antics, his freckles and mischievous eyes—a towheaded kid of ten with an Irish sense of humor, sturdily planted in a field of alien corn five thousand light years from Earth.
Sowing and reaping and bringing in the sheaves, in the blue light of a great double sun, his dreams as vibrant with promise as the interstellar warp-drive which, a century ago, had brought the first prospect ship from Earth to the stars.
He’d be a man grown now, as sturdy as his dad. You could almost take that for granted. And his sister would be a willowy girl with clear blue eyes, and she’d come out of a white plastic cottage with the buoyancy of twenty summers in her carriage and smile.
They’d be farmers still. You couldn’t change the Sweeneys in a million years, couldn’t wean them away from the good earth.
It was funny, but he couldn’t even visualize the Sweeneys without thinking of a little sleepy town, the kind of town he’d left himself as a kid to strike out across the great curve of the universe. Dry dust of Kansas and the Dakotas that would still be blowing after a thousand years!
“They’ve had time to build a town, Ned!” Cynthia said. “A really fine town with broad streets and modern, dust-proof buildings!”
Ned Jackson awoke from his reverie with a wry start. He nodded again, remembering the many other colonists and the equipment which had been shipped to the little green world across the years. Plastic materials to build houses and schools and roadways, educational materials to build eager young minds.
Every ten years a contact rocket went out from Earth by interstellar warp-drive to make a routine check. The trip was a long one—eight months—but the Central Colonization Bureau had to make sure that anarchy did not take the place of law on worlds where teeming jungles encouraged the free exercise of man’s
