Destiny Doll

ONE

The place was white and there was something aloof and puritanical and uncaring about the whiteness, as if the city stood so lofty in its thoughts that the crawling scum of life was as nothing to it.

And yet, I told myself, the trees towered over all. It had been the trees, I knew, when the ship started coming down toward the landing field, riding on the homing beam we’d caught far out in space, that had made me think we’d be landing at a village. Perhaps, I had told myself, a village not unlike that old white New England village I had seen on Earth, nestled in the valley with the laughing brook and the flame of autumn maples climbing up the hills. Watching, I had been thankful, and a bit surprised as well, to find such a place, a quiet and peaceful place, for surely any creatures that had constructed such a village would be a quiet and peaceful people, not given to the bizarre concepts and outlandish mores so often found on an alien planet.

But this was not a village. It was about as far from a village as it was possible to get. It had been the trees towering over the whiteness of it that had spelled village in my mind. But who would expect to find trees that would soar above a city, a city that rose so tall one must tilt his head to see its topmost towers?

The city rose into the air like a towering mountain range springing up, without benefit of foothills, from a level plain. It fenced in the landing field with its massive structure, like an oval of tall bleachers hemming in a playing field. From space the city had been shining white, but it no longer shone. It was white, all white, but soft satiny, having something in common with the subdued gleam of expensive china on a candle-lighted table.

The city was white and the landing field was white and the sky so faint a blue that it seemed white as well. All white except the trees that topped a city which surged up to mountain height.

My neck was getting tired from tilting my head to stare up at the city and the trees and now, when I lowered my head and looked across the field, I saw, for the first time, there were other ships upon the field. A great many other ships, I realized with a start-more ships than one would normally expect to find on even some of the larger and busier fields of the human galaxy. Ships of every size and shape and all of them were white. That had been the reason, I told myself, I’d not spotted them before. The whiteness of them served as a camouflage, blending them in with the whiteness of the field itself.

All white, I thought. The whole damn planet white. And not merely white, but a special kind of whiteness-all with that same soft-china glow. The city and the ships and the field itself all were china-white, as if they had been carved by some industrious sculptor out of one great block of stone to form a single piece of statuary.

There was no activity. There was nothing stirring. No one was coming out to meet us. The city stood up dead.

A gust of wind came from somewhere, a single isolated gust, twitching at my jacket. And I saw there was no dust. There was no dust for the wind to blow, no scraps of paper for it to roll about. I scuffed at the material which made up the landing surface and my scuffing made no marks. The material, whatever it might be, was as free of dust as if it had been swept and scrubbed less than an hour before.

Behind me I heard the scrape of boots on the ladder’s rungs. It was Sara Foster coming down the ladder and she was having trouble with that silly ballistics rifle slung on a strap across one shoulder. It was swinging with the motion of her climbing and bumping on the ladder, threatening to get caught between the rungs.

I reached up and helped her down and she swung around as soon as she reached the ground to stare up at the city. Studying the classic planes of her face and mop of curling red hair, I wondered again how a woman of such beauty could have escaped all the softness of face that would have rounded out the beauty. She reached up a hand and brushed back a lock of hair that kept falling in her eyes. It had been falling in her eyes since the first moment I had met her.

“I feel like an ant,” she said. “It just stands there, looking down at us. Don’t you feel the eyes?”

I shook my head. I had felt no eyes.

“Any minute now,” she said, “it will lift a foot and squash us.”

“Where are the other two?” I asked.

“Tuck is getting the stuff together and George is listening, with that soft, silly look pasted on his face. He says that he is home.”

“For the love of Christ,” I said.

“You don’t like George,” said Sara.

“That’s not it at all,” I said. “I can ignore the man. It’s this whole deal that gets me. It makes no sort of sense.”

“But he got us here,” she said.

“That is right,” I said, “and I hope he likes it.”

For I didn’t like it. Something about the bigness and the whiteness and the quietness of it. Something about no one coming out to greet us or to question us. Something about the directional beam that had brought us to this landing field, then no one being there. And about the trees as well. No trees had the right to grow as tall and big as those that rose above the city.

A clatter broke out above us. Friar Tuck had started down the ladder and George Smith, puffing with his bulk, was backing out the port, with Tuck guiding his waving feet to help him find the rungs.

“He’ll slip and break his neck,” I said, not caring too much if he did.

“He hangs on real good,” said Sara, “and Tuck will help him down.”

Fascinated, I watched them coming down the ladder, the friar guiding the blind man’s feet and helping him to find the rungs when he happened to misjudge them.

A blind man, I told myself-a blind man and a footloose, phony friar, and a female big game hunter off on a wild goose chase, hunting for a man who might have been no man at all, but just a silly legend. I must have been out of my mind, I told myself, to take on a job like this.

The two men finally reached the ground and Tuck, taking the blind man’s arm, turned him around so he faced the city.

Sara had been right, I saw, about that silly smile. Smith’s face was wreathed in beatitude and a look like that, planted on his flabby, vacant face, reeked of obscenity.

Sara touched the blind man’s arm with gentle fingers.

“You’re sure this is the place, George? You couldn’t be mistaken?”

The beatitude changed to an ecstasy that was frightening to see. “There is no mistake,” he babbled, his squeaky voice thickened by emotion. “My friend is here. I hear him and he makes me see. It’s almost as if I could reach out and touch him.”

He made a fumbling motion with a pudgy hand, as if he were reaching out to touch someone, but there was nothing there to touch. It all was in his mind.

It was insane on the face of it, insane to think that a blind man who heard voices-no, not voices, just a single voice- could lead us across thousands of light years, toward and above the galactic center, into territory through which no man and no human ship had been known to pass, to one specific planet. There had been, in past history, many people who had heard voices, but until now not too many people bad paid attention to them.

“There is a city,” Sara was saying to the blind man. “A great white city and trees taller than the city, trees that go up and up for miles. Is that what you see?”

“No,” said George, befuddled by what he had been told, “No, that isn’t what I see. There isn’t any city and there aren’t any trees.” He gulped. “I see,” he said, “I see...” He groped for what he saw and finally gave up. He waved his hands and his face was creased with the effort to tell us what he saw. “I can’t tell you what I see,” he finally whispered. “I can’t find the words for it. There aren’t any words.”

“There is something coming,” said Friar Tuck, pointing toward the city. “I can’t make it out. Just a shimmer. As if there were something moving.”

I looked where the friar was pointing and I caught the shimmer. But that was all it was. There was nothing one could really see. Out there, at the base of the city wall, something seemed to be moving, an elusive flow and sparkle.

Sara was looking through her glasses and now she slipped the strap over her shoulder and handed them to me.

“What do you think, captain?”

I put the glasses to my eyes and moved them slowly until I caught the movement. At first it was no more than a moving blur, but slowly it grew in size and separated. Horses? I wondered. It didn’t make much sense that there’d be horses here, but that was what they looked like. White horses running toward us-if there were horses, of course they would be white! But very funny horses and, it seemed, with very funny feet, not running the way a normal horse would run, but with a crazy gait, rocking as they ran.

As they came closer I could make out further detail. They were horses, all right. Formalized horses-pert upright ears, flaring nostrils, arched necks, manes that rose as if the wind were blowing through them, but manes that never moved. Like wild running horses some crummy artist would draw for a calendar, but keeping the set pose the artist had given them, never changing it. And their feet? Not feet, I saw. Not any feet at all, but rockers. Two pair of rockers, front and rear, with the front ones narrower so there’d be no interference as the horses ran-reaching forward with the rear pair and, as they touched the ground, rocking forward on them, with the front pair lifted and reaching out to touch the ground and rock in turn.

Shaken, I lowered the glasses and handed them to Sara.

“This,” I said, “is one you won’t believe.”

She put the glasses up and I watched the horses coming on. There were eight of them and they all were white and one was so like the other there was no telling them apart.

Sara took down the glasses.

“Merry-go-round,” she said.

“Merry-go-round?”

“Sure. Those mechanical contraptions they have at fairs and carnivals and amusement parks.”

I shook my head, bewildered. “I never went to an amusement park,” I told her. “Not that kind of amusement park. But when I was a kid I had a hobbyhorse.”

The eight came rushing in, sliding to a halt. Once they halted, they stood rocking gently back and forth.

The foremost of them spoke to us, employing that universal space argot that man had found already in existence when he’d gone into space more than twenty centuries before, a language composed of terms and phrases and words from a hundred different tongues, forged into a bastard lingo by which many diverse creatures could converse with one another.

“We be hobbies,” said the horse. “My name is Dobbin and we have come to take you in.”

No part of him moved. He simply stood there, rocking gently, with his ears still perked, his carven nostrils flaring, with the nonexistent breeze blowing at his mane. I got the impression, somehow, that the words he spoke came out of his ears.

“I think they’re cute,” Sara cried, delighted. And that was typical; she would think that they were cute.

Dobbin paid her no attention. “We urge upon you haste,” he said. “There is a mount for each of you and four to take the luggage. We have but a small amount of time.”

I didn’t like the way that it was going; I didn’t like a thing about it. I’m afraid I snapped at him.

“We don’t like being hurried,” I told him. “If you have no time, we can spend the night on the ship and come in tomorrow morning.”

“No! No!” the hobby protested frantically. “That is impossible. There exists great danger with the setting of the sun. You must be undercover by the time the sun is set.”

“Why don’t we do the way he says,” suggested Tuck, pulling his robe tight around himself. “I don’t like it out here. If there is no time now, we could come back and pick up the luggage later.”

Said Dobbin, “We’ll take the luggage now. There’ll be no time in the morning.”

“It seems to me,” I said to Dobbin, “you’re greatly pressed for time. If that’s the case, why don’t you simply turn around and go back where you came from. We can take care of ourselves.”

“Captain Ross,” said Sara Foster, firmly, “I’m not going to walk all that way if there’s a chance to ride. I think you’re being foolish.”

“That may well be,” I said, angrily, “but I don’t like snotty robots ordering me around.”

“We be hobbies,” Dobbin said. “We not be any robots.”

“You be human hobbies?”

“I do not know your meaning.”

“Human beings made you. Creatures very much like us.”

“I do not know,” said Dobbin.

“The hell you don’t,” I said. I turned to Smith. “George,” I said.

The blind man turned his puffy face toward me. The look of ecstasy still was pasted on it.

“What is it, captain?”

“In your talk back and forth with this friend of yours, did you ever mention hobbies?”

“Hobbies? Oh, you mean stamp collecting and...”

“No, I don’t,” I said. “I mean hobbyhorses. Did you ever mention hobbyhorses?”

“Until this moment,” said the blind man, “I never heard of them.”

“But you had toys when you were ‘a child.”

The blind man sighed. “Not the kind you are thinking of. I was born blind. I have never seen. The kind of toys other children had were not...”

“Captain,” Sara said, angrily, “you are ridiculous. Why all this suspicion?”

“I’ll tell you that,” I said, just as angrily, “and it’s an easy answer...”

“I know,” she said. “I know. Suspicion, time and time again, has saved that neck of yours.”

“Gracious lady,” Dobbin said, “please believe there is great danger once the sun has set. I plead with you, I implore you, I urge you to come with us and most speedily at that.”

“Tuck,” said Sara, “get up that ladder and start getting down the stuff!” She swung belligerently toward me. “Have you objections, captain?”

“Miss Foster,” I told her, “it’s your ship and it’s your money. You’re paying for the show.”

“You’re laughing at me,” she stormed. “You’ve laughed all the way. You never really believed in anything I told you. You don’t believe at all-not in anything.”

“I got you here,” I told her, grimly, “and I’ll get you back. That’s the deal we made. All I ask is that you try not to make the job any harder than it has to be.”

And immediately that I said it, I was sorry that I had. We were on an alien planet and very far from home and we should stick together and not start off with bickering. More than likely, I admitted to myself, she had been quite right; I might have been ridiculous. But right away, I amended that. Ridiculous on the surface, maybe, but not in principle. When you hit an alien planet, you are on your own and you have to keep your senses and your hunches sharp. I’d been on a lot of alien planets and had always managed and so, of course, had Sara, but she’d always hit them with a good-sized expeditionary force and I’d been on my own.

Tuck, at the first word from her, had gone swarming up the ladder, with his robe tucked up underneath his belt so he wouldn’t trip, and now was handing down the duffle bags and the other plunder to Sara, who was halfway up the ladder, taking the stuff from him and dropping it as gently as she could at the ladder’s base. There was one thing you had to say about the gal-she never shirked the work. She was al. ways in there, doing ‘her fair share and perhaps a good deal more.

“All right,” I said to Dobbin, “run your packhorses over here. How do you handle this?”

“I regret,” said Dobbin, “that we haven’t any arms. But with the situation as it is, you’ll be forced to do the packing. Just heap the luggage on top the hobbies’ backs and when the load is completed, metal cinches will extrude from the belly and strap the load securely.”

“Ingenious,” I said.

Dobbin made a little forward dip upon his rockers, in the semblance of hewing. “Always,” he said, “we attempt to serve.”

Four of the horses came rocking up and I began loading them. When Tuck got through with handing down the gear, Sara came and helped me. Tuck closed the port and by the time he had climbed down the ladder, we were all set to go.

The sun was touching the city skyline and hunks were being nibbled out of it by the topmost towers. It was slightly more yellow than the sun of Earth-perhaps a K-type star. The ship would know, of course; the ship would have it all. The ship did all the work that a man was supposed to do. It gobbled up the data and pulled it all apart and put it back together. It knew about this planet and about the planet’s star, it knew about the atmosphere and the chemistry and all the rest of it and it would have been more than willing to give it out to anyone who asked. But I hadn’t asked. I had meant to go back and get the data sheet, but I hadn’t counted on getting a reverse bum’s rush by a pack of hobbyhorses. Although, I told myself, it probably made, no difference, I could come back in the morning. But I couldn’t bring myself to like the fact that I’d not latched onto that data sheet.

“Dobbin,” I asked, “what is all this danger business? What are we supposed to be afraid of?”

“I cannot inform you,” Dobbin said, “since I, myself, fail to understand, but I can assure you...”

“OK, let it go,” I told him.

Tuck was puffing and panting, trying to boost Smith onto one of the hobbies, Sara already was on one of them, sitting straight and prim, the perfect picture of a gal on the threshold of a very great adventure, and that, of course, was all it was to her-another great adventure. Sitting there, proud, astride her mount, with that ridiculous ancient rifle slung across her shoulder, nattily attired in an adventure-going costume.

I glanced quickly about the bowl that was the landing field, rimmed in by the city, and there was nothing stirring. Shadows ran out from the city’s western wall as the sun went inching down behind the buildings and some of those western buildings had turned from white to black, but there were no lights.

Where was everyone? Where were the city’s residents and all those visitors who’d come down on the spaceships standing like ghostly tombstones on the field? And why were the ships all white?

“Honored sir,” Dobbin said to me, “if you please, would you get into my saddle. Our time is running short.”

A chill was in the air and I don’t mind admitting that I felt a twinge of fright. I don’t know why. Perhaps just the place itself, perhaps the feeling of being trapped on the landing field rimmed in by the city, perhaps the fact that there seemed no living thing in sight except the hobbies-if you could call them living and I suppose you could.

I reached up and lifted the strap of my laser gun off my shoulder and, grasping it in hand, swung into Dobbin’s saddle.

“You need no weapon here,” Dobbin said, disapprovingly. I didn’t answer him. It was my own damn business.

Dobbin wheeled and we started out across the field, heading toward the city. It was a crazy kind of ride-smooth enough, no jerking, but going up and down as much, it seemed, as one was moving forward. It wasn’t rocking; it was like skating on a sine wave.

The city seemed not to grow much larger, nor to gain in detail. We bad been much farther from it, I realized, than it bad appeared; the landing field was larger, too, than it had appeared. Behind me, Tuck let out a yell.

“Captain!”

I twisted in the saddle.

“The ship!” yelled Tuck. “The ship! They’re doing something to it.”

And they were, indeed-whoever they might be.

A long-necked mechanism stood beside the ship. It looked like a bug with a squat and massive body and a long and slender neck with a tiny head atop it. From the mouth of it sprayed out a mist directed at the ship. Where it struck the ship, the ship was turning white, just like those other tombstone ships that stood upon the, field.

I let out an angry yelp, reaching for a rein and yanking hard. But I might as well have yanked upon a rock. Dobbin kept straight on.

“Turn around,” I yelled. “Go back!”

“There is no turning back, most honored sir,” said Dobbin, conversationally, not even panting with his running. “There is no time. We must reach the safety of the city.”

“There is time, by God,” I yelled, jerking up the gun and aiming it at the ground in front of us, between Dobbin’s ears.

“Shut your eyes,” I yelled to the others, and pulled the trigger one notch back. Even through my eyelids, I sensed the flaring of the laser-light as it bounced back from the ground. Under me Dobbin reared and spun, almost swapping end for end, and when I opened my eyes we were heading back toward the ship.

“You’ll be the death of us, crazy being,” Dobbin moaned. “All of us will die.”

I looked behind me and the hobbies all were following. Dobbin, it appeared, was leader and where he went they were content to follow. But farther back there was no sign of where the laser bolt had struck. Even at first notch capacity it should have made a mark; there should have been a smoking crater back there where it struck.

Sara was riding with one arm up across her eyes.

“You all right?” I asked.

“You crazy fool!” she cried.

“I yelled for you to close your eyes,” I said. “There was bound to be reflection.”

“You yelled, then fired,” she said. “You didn’t give us time.”

She took her arm down and her eyes blinked at me and, hell, she was all right. Just something else to bitch about; she never missed a chance.

Ahead of us the bug that had been spraying the ship was scurrying off across the field. It must have had wheels or treads underneath it, for it was spinning along at a headlong clip, its long neck stretched out in front of it in its eagerness to get away from there.

“Please, sir,” Dobbin pleaded, “we are simply wasting time. There is nothing that can be done.”

“One more word out of you,” I said, “and this time right between the ears.”

We reached the ship and Dobbin skidded to a halt, but I didn’t wait for him to stop. I hit the ground and was running toward the ship while he still was moving. Although what I intended to do I had no idea.

I reached the ship and I could see that it was covered with some stuff that looked like frosty glass and when I say covered, I mean covered-every inch of it. There was no metal showing. It looked unfunctional, like a model ship. Reduced in size, it could have passed for those little model ships sold in decorator shops to stick up on the mantle.

I put out my hand and touched it and it was slick and hard. There was no look of metal and there was no feel of metal, either. I rapped it with my gun stock and it rang like a bell, setting up a resonance that went bouncing across the field and came back as an echo from the city walls.

“What is it, captain?” Sara asked, her voice somewhat shaky. This was her ship, and there was no one who could mess around with it.

“A coating of something hard,” I said. “As if it had been sealed.”

“You mean we can’t get into it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe if we had a sledge hammer to crack it, we could peel it off.”

She made a sudden motion and the rifle was off her back and the butt against her shoulder. I’ll say this for her: crazy as that gun might be, she could handle it.

The sound of the shot was loud and flat and the hobbies reared in terror. But above the sound of the report itself was another sound, a wicked howling that almost screamed, the noise of a ricocheting bullet tumbling end for end, and pitched lower than the shrill howling of the slug was the booming resonance of the milk-white ship. But there was no indication of where the bullet might have struck. The whiteness of the ship still was smooth-uncracked, unblemished, unmarked. Two thousand foot-pounds of metal had slammed against it and had not made a dent.

I lifted the laser gun and Dobbin said to me, “There be no use, you foolish folk. There is nothing you can do.”

I whirled on him angrily. “I thought I told you...’ I yelled. “One more word out of you and right between the eyes.”

“Violence,” Dobbin told me, perkily, “will get you nowhere. But staying here, once the sun has set, spells very rapid death.”

“But the ship!” I shouted.

“The ship is sealed,” said Dobbin, “like all the others. Better sealed with you outside of it than with you still inside.”

And although I would not have admitted it, I knew that he was right in saying there was nothing we could do. For I recalled that the field had been unmarked by the laser beam and undoubtedly all this whiteness was the same-the field, the ships, the city, all coated, more than likely, with some substance so tightly bonded in its atomic structure that it was indestructible.

“I sorrow greatly for you,” said Dobbin, with no sorrow in his voice. “I know the shock of you. But once on this planet, no one ever leaves. Although there is no need of also dying, I plead with you compassionately to get into the saddle and let us head for safety.”

I looked up at Sara and she nodded quietly. She had figured it, I knew, about the way I had, although in my case most unwillingly. There was no use in staying out here. The ship was sealed, whatever that might mean or for whatever purpose, and when morning came we could come back to see what we could do. From the moment we had met him, Dobbin had been insistent about the danger. There might be danger or there might be none-there was no way, certainly, that we could determine if there were or weren’t. The only sensible thing, at the moment, was to go along with him.

I swung swiftly to the saddle and even before I found seat, Dobbin had whirled about, running even as he led.

“We have lost most valued time,” he told me. “We will try with valiance to make it up. We yet may reach the city.”

A good part of the landing field lay in shadow now and only the sky was bright. A faint, smokelike dusk was filtering through the city.

Once on this planet, Dobbin had said, no one ever leaves. But these were his words alone, and nothing else. Perhaps there was a real intent to keep us here, which would explain the sealing of the ship, but there would be ways, I told myself, that could be tried to get off the planet when the time to go should come. There were always ways.

The city was looming up as we drew closer, and now the buildings began to assume their separate shapes. Up till now they had been a simple mass that had the appearance of a solid cliff thrusting up from the flatness of the field. They had seemed tall from out in the center of the field; now they reared into the sky so far that, this close, it was impossible to follow with the eye up to their tops.

The city still stayed dead. There were no lights in any of the windows-if, indeed, the buildings did have windows. There was no sign of movement at the city’s base. There were no outlying buildings; the field ran up to the base of the buildings and the buildings then jutted straight into the sky.

The hobbies thundered cityward, their rockers pounding out a ringing clangor as they humped along like a herd of horses galloping wildly before a scudding storm front. Once you got the hang of riding them, it wasn’t bad at all. You just went sort of loose and let your body follow that undulating sine wave.

The city walls loomed directly in front of us, great slabs of masonry that went up and up, and now I saw that there were streets, or at least what I took for streets, narrow slits of empty blackness that looked like fractures in a monstrous cliff.

The hobbies plunged into one of the slits of emptiness and darkness closed upon us. There was no light here; except when the sun stood straight overhead, there never would be light. The walls seemed to rise all about us, the slit that was a street narrowing down to a vanishing point so that the walls seemed on every hand.

Ahead of us one building stood a little farther back, widening the street, and from the level of the street a wide ramp ran up to massive doors. The hobbies turned and flung themselves at the ramp and went humping up it and through one of the gaping doors.

We burst into a room where there was a little light and the light, I saw, came from great rectangular blocks set into the wall that faced us.

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.