The Ceres Solution

Chapter Seventeen

The animal had been watching Hargate all day.

Its body was the best part of a metre in length and had an asymmetrical green-and-grey pattern which camouflaged it so effectively that Hargate was still unable to decide whether it was shaped like a beaver or a wolf. He was equally uncertain about the creature’s intentions. When he was wakening from a doze he would notice a clump of grass a few paces away and while he was trying to recall if it had been there earlier the clump would blink a green-gold eye, letting him know he was under close surveillance.

Shouted swear words and sudden movements of his arms were always enough to drive the creature off—it scuttled away backwards, eyes filled with mute reproach—leaving him to speculate about whether it had been motivated by friendship, curiosity or hunger. The third possibility seemed the most likely to Hargate, and he was deeply uneasy about his prospects during the coming hours of darkness.

After being abandoned by Vekrynn on the previous evening he had resigned himself to, and had almost been reconciled to, the idea of dying of exposure while the bright ciphers of alien star groupings wheeled overhead. It would have been a more dignified and exotic death than he had ever anticipated, even in his brief sojourn in the Aristotle colony, but the night had remained warm, and at dawn his physical condition had been comparatively good. He guessed that the Mollanian drugs and other therapies were helping sustain him because, during the second day, apart from occasional bouts of double vision and pins-and-needles in his legs, his chief source of discomfort was hunger—and the attentions of the alien quadruped.

By mid-afternoon it seemed to him that the creature—he had dubbed it a bealf—was becoming bolder and more persistent with its approaches, that it would soon have to be deterred by something more concrete than bellowed obscenities. Trying not to lose sight of his adversary while it inched its way through the grass, he took inventory of his resources.

The weakness of his arms precluded the use of club or missile, but there was the possibility that draining some electrolyte from his chair’s batteries would provide the semblance of a useful weapon. A major drawback to the scheme, however, was that he had no suitable lightweight container from which to hurl the acid. He scanned his surroundings and steadied his gaze on the clump of palm-like trees some two hundred metres away. Could their resemblance to terrestrial palms extend as far as the production of large, thin-shelled nuts? He had no idea what the odds might be, but the chance of finding a source of armament and food in one place was something he could not ignore.

At least I don’t want to die any more, he thought, sardonically amused. Vekrynn has made me realise that being dead isn’t everything in life.

Hargate switched on his power circuit and tentatively advanced the drive lever a short distance. The chair stirred itself reluctantly, but by using all his strength on the wheels he got it to lurch forward out of the grooves it had created in the turf. He glanced triumphantly in the direction of the bealf and saw it slowly backing away, eyes intent.

Didn’t think I could move, did you? Well, friend bealf, with any luck that’s nothing to the next surprise you’re going to get. Grinning malevolently at his thoughts, Hargate urged his chair towards the trees, aided by a slight incline.

“Don’t leave,” a man’s voice said from close behind him. “We’ve got things to talk about.”

Gasping for air, Hargate slewed himself around and saw that a very tall, black-haired man had materialised at the spot from which Vekrynn had disappeared. He had his left arm tucked into the front of his slate-grey overcoat and in his right hand was carrying an ordinary plastic shopping bag, garishly decorated, which stood out as totally incongruous in the alien setting. The newcomer looked like a Terran—he did not have the extreme breadth of skull that Hargate had observed in Vekrynn and other Mollanians—but the fact that he could skord was significant, and possibly threatening. Could it be that Vekrynn had sent someone to complete his work for him?

“Maybe I’m too busy to talk,” Hargate said, trying to make his voice hard. “Who are you?”

“I’m Lorrest tye Thralen.”

“That tells me bugger all.”

The stranger’s smile was unexpectedly boyish and amiable. “I’m a friend of Gretana and an enemy of Warden Vekrynn—is that any better?”

“Some.” Hargate saw the tall man’s image become two, realised he was squinting again and fought to bring his eye muscles under control. He had persuaded himself that he was prepared to die in a short time, with an entire alien world for a marker, but now that it no longer seemed necessary he could admit to himself just how much he wanted to stay alive.

“Well, I must say I’m glad to…” Hargate stopped speaking and swallowed as he heard a tremor come into his voice. “Are you just going to stand there and grin?”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry!” Lorrest came towards him with exaggerated deference. “I thought you might be dead by this time, but I took a chance and brought some beer and sandwiches. May I presume that you eat such humble food?”

Slightly disconcerted, Hargate watched in silence as Lorrest took off his overcoat, spread it on the grass and emptied the contents of his plastic bag on to it. As well as the cans of beer and wrapped sandwiches there was a packet of chocolate chip cookies.

“That looks good,” Hargate said. “I don’t know how I got so hungry inside a day.”

Lorrest glanced at the sun. “You’ve been here more than a day, chum. An Earth day, I mean—this planet must turn a lot slower.”

“I never thought of that.” Hargate looked around him, freshly reminded that he was far from home, and his gaze fastened on the crouching form of the bealf, which had advanced to within twenty paces. “Say, are you carrying any weapons?”

“No.” Lorrest swivelled his head, taking in the panorama of mountain ranges. “Why?”

“I’m nearly certain that thing wants to eat me.” Hargate pointed at the bealf. “I’d like to put a hole through it.”

Lorrest snorted with amusement. “Gretana said you were a rough-cornered type, and I’m beginning to see what she meant.” He tore off part of a sandwich, squeezed it into a ball and lobbed it towards the attentive animal. The bealf seized the morsel in its jaws, then backed away until it was lost to view in the grass.

“It’s nice having so much food you can afford to throw it away,” Hargate grumbled. “Don’t forget I was dumped here to starve.”

“Okay—let’s talk about that.” Lorrest handed Hargate a can of beer and a sandwich. “Better still, let’s talk about everything.”

The hour that followed was one of the most singular of Hargate’s life. On a personal level, he found he could relax and communicate freely with the Mollanian, in spite of the vast dissimilarities in their backgrounds. Their conversational styles meshed so perfectly that Hargate soon felt a rapport, even though he guessed that Lorrest was using some rehearsed diplomacies, and the feeling was good. Right from the start he was able to drink beer without embarrassment, although its fizziness increased the regurgitation through his nose, quickly soaking his handkerchief. During each bout of Hargate’s coughing Lorrest, neither staring nor pretending to be completely unaware, waited patiently until the talk could continue. And the story he unfolded was a seething white wave in Hargate’s mind, obliterating old concepts, strewing others in startling new patterns.

“I can’t quite take this in,” he said at one stage. “The Moon is another world—I can’t imagine it being destroyed.”

“It’s as good as done,” Lorrest assured him. “Less than two Earth days left toil.”

Hargate considered the incredible statement. “And is there nothing Vekrynn and the Bureau can do to save it?”

“Not a thing, though they won’t realise it until it’s too late.”

“I don’t get you.”

“We have allowed for the fact that they’ll locate Ceres and hit it with enough thruster rays to deflect it,” Lorrest said. “What Vekrynn doesn’t know is that we were lucky enough to find a major node on the surface of the Moon, in the Ocean of Storms. We have aimed Ceres exactly at the node, and we have put a special kind of machine there—a cone field generator—and it will activate itself about five minutes before the impact is due. When that happens Ceres will be snapped back on to its scheduled path, and…bingo!”

Hargate tried to visualise the colossal energies involved in flicking a minor planet around like a marble. “This machine, this cone field generator, is it something like a powerful magnet?”

“Yes, except that it works by locally modifying a few geometries. I don’t know if I could explain it to you.”

“That’s all right—I’ve crammed enough new stuff into my brain already. But if that sort of machine is so good, why doesn’t Vekrynn use one to pull Ceres really off course?”

Lorrest gestured with a beer can. “No anchorage. Any ship the machine was mounted in would simply be drawn towards Ceres—not the other way round.”

“I see.” Hargate’s thoughts returned to the basic issue, the one he found hardest to incorporate into his world picture. “But will pulverising the Moon really make any difference? Gretana told me something about how these second-and third-order forces of yours affect living matter, but…Our bodies are two-thirds water, so I can visualise a slight tidal effect, perhaps, but what else?”

Lorrest’s manner became didactic. “Don’t dismiss water so quickly, my friend. Mollanian science is a long way ahead of Earth’s—and we’re still arguing about the structure of water. The hydrogen-to-oxygen bond is so weak that a glass of water, no matter how simple and stable it may look, is like a single giant molecule constantly reforming and rebuilding itself. Even in warm water there are short-lived regions of ice crystals that form and melt millions of times every second. Water is uniquely flexible and fragile, which makes it the perfect trigger substance for biological processes, and—believe me—both the structure of water and the chemical reactions taking place in it are affected by cosmic influences.”

“I suppose forces that you, as an adult, can actually feel must be able to affect us,” Hargate conceded. “What’s it like, being able to sense skord lines and the movements of planets and such?”

“I hate using cliches, but how do you explain sight to the…?” Lorrest paused to stare at Hargate. “But that’s not exactly the case, is it? As a boy you found the Bureau’s Carsewell nodal point by yourself, and you knew the place was special. How did that feel?”

Hargate considered the impossibility of describing in full the emotional experience of a childhood visit to Cotter’s Edge. “I didn’t feel any planets tugging at me.”

“It isn’t like that. It’s…Look, the world we’re on now has no moons and there are no other planets in the system. Do you feel any difference?”

Hargate tried to turn his senses inwards, to locate a special reservoir of tranquillity. “Perhaps,” he said, unwilling to acknowledge his failure. “Do you think I could learn to skord?”

“That’s something I’d dearly love to know.” Lorrest’s face, in one of its rapid changes of expression, showed a hint of anger. “We on Mollan are the only one of the known human cultures who use sympathetic congruency for interstellar travel. The ability is almost certain to be present or latent in all the others, but a cornerstone of our Government’s policy is that we don’t make contact, don’t spread the knowledge. It would result in outsiders arriving on Mollan, you see, bringing new ideas and attitudes, disturbing the peace of the long Sunday afternoon. A man like Vekrynn would rather die than face up to change and growth and uncertainty.”

“I don’t think he’d rather die.” Hargate went on to talk about his intuitive belief that Warden Vekrynn had a pathological fear of death.

“I know he wants to be immortal, but that leaves a lot still to be explained.” Lorrest made a sweeping gesture which took in the surrounding vistas of plains and mountains, lakes and seas. “For instance, what are we doing here, two hundred light years inside a non-human sector? Nobody else on Mollan even knows about this world, and I wouldn’t have found out if Gretana hadn’t backtracked on herself and seen Vekrynn’s mnemo-curve. Why does he come here?”

“Perhaps he just keeps the place in reserve, for losing troublemakers.”

“Perhaps, but I doubt it.” Lorrest stood up, signalling an end to the strange picnic, and looked around with sky-mirrored eyes. “Have a look at that stream over there.”

Hargate concentrated his gaze on a ribbon of silvered water about a hundred metres from the hummock upon which they had eaten. “What about it?”

“Do those stones in it look like stepping stones to you?”

Hargate swore as he realised that in all his hours of surveying the same scene he had overlooked the clear evidence of human interference with the environment. “Stepping stones to what?”

“There’s only one way to find out. Come on.” Without hesitation, Lorrest grasped the back of Hargate’s chair with his right hand and began to push. Hargate fully expected Lorrest to leave him at the side of the stream and cross it alone, but on reaching the bank the tall Mollanian moved to his side, threw his right arm across the chair and lifted it clear of the ground. Four long steps took the two men and the machine to the other side of the stream in as many seconds.

Impressed by the display of strength, Hargate said, “Next time you might have the manners to ask my permission.”

“Next time I might throw you in.” Lorrest got behind the chair again and urged it in the direction of a wooded area which lay about a kilometre ahead.

“What are you hoping to find anyway?”

“I’ve no idea,” Lorrest replied. “All we can deduce is that when old man Vekrynn came here he had one thing in mind. Secrecy. Concealment. And those trees make the best hiding place in this area.”

“You’re wasting your time,” Hargate sneered. He repeated the statement more than once as the wheelchair bounced and rocked on the uneven ground, and in between times he swore volubly and slapped at tiny winged creatures which rose up from the disturbed grass.

“I’m glad to see somebody else doesn’t like bugs,” Lorrest said, inconsequentially. “We don’t have them on Mollan, you know. Most of the pollination is done by birds. Our flowers are all white, like our birds, and they imitate birdsongs to attract business. It’s quite an experience for a Mollanian when he sees the kind of flowers you have on Earth.”

“Shove the botany lecture—I’m not interested.” Hargate made an ineffectual attempt to halt the chair by applying the brakes. “If you want to blunder around in those trees and risk getting your ass chewed off by monsters that’s all right with me, but I demand to be left out in the open where at least I can see what’s…”

His voice failed as shiftings of parallax caused by the chair’s rapid progress suddenly opened an avenue deep into the trees to where something large and apparently with a surface of polished gold reflected the sunlight. The object’s curvatures shone with a buttery lustre. Before Hargate could announce what he had seen Lorrest, now breathing hard from his exertions, gave a satisfied grunt.

“Vekrynn always had a weakness for shiny things,” he said. “It wouldn’t even occur to him to camouflage an aircraft.”

“What makes you so sure it’s an aircraft?”

“This is bad submarine country, mon ami. We’ll take a closer look.”

On being propelled into the vicinity of the machine, Hargate was able to confirm that it had been designed for flying, although the centrally positioned wings seemed too small for the fuselage and no control surfaces were in evidence. It appeared to have the capacity of a rail carriage and, now that he could examine it closely, Hargate realised that the aircraft was old. The golden skin, which had appeared immaculate from a distance, was dulled in some places and was peeling away from an underlying grey metal in others. On the side of the fuselage was a painted inscription in blocky characters which Hargate took to be Mollanian.

He pointed the lettering out to Lorrest. “What does it say?”

“It roughly translates as Peninsular Educational Tours,”

Lorrest said, shaking his head in bafflement. “This grows curiouser and curiouser. One disadvantage of being able to skord from point to point on a planet, the way we do on Mollan, is that kids can grow up with no idea what the territory is like in between. Some educational authorities try to put that right by flying them around in aircraft like this one.”

“What’s it doing here?”

“That’s something else I’d like to know. This is the safest aircraft ever devised—three entirely independent means of staying aloft—so it’s a logical type for a man like Vekrynn to use, but did he steal it? And how did he get it here? I daresay an assembly robot could have put it together for him quickly enough, but he’d have had to skord it out here bit by bit, and that would have taken a lot of his time. I just don’t get it.” Still shaking his head, Lorrest walked right round the aircraft once, then went to a large door forward of the wing. It resisted his attempts to open it. Apparently undeterred, he took out a brown wallet, riffled through its contents with great care and finally removed from it what appeared to be a rectangle of ordinary writing paper. He held the paper in the palm of his hand and pressed it against the aircraft’s skin, close to the door handle, for about ten seconds. Pausing to give Hargate a parodied conspirator’s wink, he tried the door again and this time it swung open immediately, revealing a roomy interior.

“That’s a smart piece of paper,” Hargate commented.

Lorrest nodded, putting the white scrap back into his wallet. “It’s a machine, of course, but I subscribe to the idea that no electronic device is perfect until it’s smaller and lighter than the original design sketch. And, luckily, I know this type of aircraft well. Let’s get you on board.”

“In there?” Hargate was taken aback. “Are you going to fly it?”

Lorrest’s shoulders heaved once before he frowned and clasped his left arm. “No more feed lines like that, please. Naturally I’m going to fly it.”

“But where to?”

“The plan is to fly it to where Vekrynn flies it, and find out exactly what he has tucked away on this planet. It seems an interesting way to pass a few hours.”

“How will you know where he goes?”

“You have just picked out the major weak point in the scheme,” Lorrest said, wheeling Hargate towards the open door. “A lot depends on whether Vekrynn has ever been stupid enough to let the plane take him to his destination under automatic control. If he has, it’ll be fairly easy to duplicate the flight plan; if he hasn’t, if he has always done the flying himself, the job will be a lot trickier. To be honest, it would probably be too much for the equipment I have with me—so keep your fingers crossed.”

Lorrest, again displaying a surprising degree of strength, lifted Hargate and the wheelchair under his right arm and with a single turning movement got them into the aircraft. The interior was a single large compartment, with a pilot’s seat and controls in the nose. Ranged around the sides were chairs, desks and storage cupboards which, despite their distant origin, had an obvious kinship to Terran classroom furniture. As further evidence that children tended to be the same everywhere, many of the desks and adjoining window frames had been drawn on and scribbled on with coloured inks.

Hargate, noticing a small object on one of the desks, rolled himself closer to it and found the stub of a perfectly ordinary pencil, the ends of which showed unmistakable signs of having been chewed. Intrigued, he picked the pencil up, but dropped it immediately when its outer casing crumbled into yellowish dust, suggesting that it could have been lying there for centuries. It came to him that no amount of similarities between Terran and Mollanian children could outweigh the fact that the latter measured their life expectancies in millennia. The disparity was something he had been too busy to brood upon, but now the sheer unfairness of it darkened his mind and mood. He turned and wheeled himself to the front of the aircraft, where Lorrest had knelt down and was beginning to remove panels from the control console.

“Is it true what Gretana told me?” he said. “Do people on all the other human worlds live for seven hundred or eight hundred years?”

“That’s the norm.” Lorrest continued working as he spoke. “Seven or eight centuries.”

“The first part of our Christian Bible quotes figures like that. It says that Methuselah clocked up nearly a thousand years—do you think that’s the way it might actually have been?”

“I doubt it,” Lorrest said abstractedly. “That implies that something happened quite suddenly some thousands of years ago to degrade Terran biomechanisms, and it doesn’t seem likely to me. I’m more inclined to believe it has always been that way. I’d blame it on the…”

“The Moon! Unstable lunar influences!” Hargate squirmed in his chair. “When you get on to something you really stick with it, don’t you?”

“It’s the only way, my friend.” Lorrest smiled as he again opened his wallet and selected a rectangular scrap of paper from a slim bundle. “I’ll bet you anything you like that Vekrynn doesn’t even know that tools like this exist.”

“Is there anything about us that you can’t blame on the Moon?”

“His mind is as stagnant as Mollanian technology itself, and that’s saying something.”

“How about the shape of our heads? Or the smell of our socks?”

“The design of a Mollanian artifact can remain unchanged for thousands of years. If it weren’t for organisations like 2H there’d be virtually no creative thinking.”

“Scrotum fillers to you,” Hargate snapped, wheeling his chair away. He positioned himself at the rear of the cabin, scowling, refusing to acknowledge the wave Lorrest gave him a minute later when the aircraft’s door swung itself shut. He expected to hear engines starting up, but within a few seconds there was a change in the quality of light streaming in through the windows and he realised the aircraft was rising vertically, in total silence. At a height of about a hundred metres the movement was translated into horizontal flight and the landscape began to flow beneath with increasing rapidity.

Hargate studied the complex of geographical features. The incredible clarity of the air seemed to suspend the rules of perspective, creating a new kind of space in which distant peaks perched confusingly on the slopes of nearer mountains, and in which remote blue seas hung in flat suspension above middle-ground lakes. He tried to visualise what they would find at the end of the flight—a secret pleasure dome, perhaps, or a simple hermitage—but the wealth of microscopic detail quickly became numbing to the mind, making it expedient for him to turn his attention to the aircraft’s interior.

“How old do you reckon this flivver is?” he said to Lorrest, reopening communications.

“Five or six centuries at the most,” Lorrest replied. “After that you start getting too many structural failures and it’s easier to switch to a new machine.”

“I see.” Intrigued by the possibility that the aircraft had been ferrying Mollanian children around their world at the time of Columbus, Hargate prowled about the cabin, opening drawers and lockers, occasionally discovering traces of occupation. In one place he found a small engraved bracelet, in another a magnifying glass—apparently commonplace objects which, because of their origins, he saw as archaeological treasures, worth stowing away in his pockets.

He had almost completed his meagre plundering when he noticed, tucked into a recess below a window, a complicated metal object which looked like an engineering instrument in some respects and in others like one of the mathematical sculptures he had once constructed for a living. It had a central spine from which sprouted numerous slim telescopic rods, all finely graduated, terminating in a glittering strip of silver. Hargate stared at it with a greedy quickening of his heart, intuitively identifying it as having something to do with Mollanian instantaneous travel. He snatched it from the recess and went forward to where Lorrest was sitting in the nose of the aircraft.

“It’s a child’s trainer,” Lorrest explained, taking the object and casually remoulding the bright strip to a new shape. “They use it to set up basic mnemo-curves.”

“How about me?” Hargate reached for the trainer with covetous fingers. “Do you think I could learn to skord?”

Lorrest gave him a searching glance. “You keep coming back to that, don’t you?”

“You don’t understand—this what I had in place of religion. As a kid, I only saw Gretana once at Cotter’s Edge, but that was all I needed. I never told anybody about seeing her, but all my life I knew there were people to whom the ordinary rules didn’t apply, and that was very important to me. As far as I was concerned, you see, we had a bad set of rules. It comforted me to know there was a bigger and better game going on somewhere. I suppose I was nursing a secret hope that some day I’d be invited to play. Does that sound crazy to you?”

“I think I understand,” Lorrest said. “But why is it so important for you to skord?”

“It’s part of my personal mathematics. I like the idea of reducing time to the status of an ordinary dimension, and that’s because I’m short of time.” Hargate hesitated, wondering if he could ever get his point of view across to the Mollanian. “I’ve only got a year or so left—perhaps a lot less—and I want to make the maximum use of it. Mathematically speaking, I want to extend myself in three dimensions to compensate for deficiencies in the fourth.”

Lorrest gazed at him for a few seconds, his eyes becoming lensed with tears. “Why is there no justice, Denny?”

“What do you mean?”

“When I think of the way most of my people squander all those centuries they’ve grabbed for themselves…those pale ghosts of human beings…while you’ve got enough courage for…for…”

“Courage my ass,” Hargate put in. “How about it? Can you teach me to skord?”

“I honestly don’t know. Right from infancy Mollanians are aware of living in a matrix of third-order forces, and that seems to give us an in-built mathematical faculty that a Terran might never be able to acquire.”

Hargate refused to be discouraged. “Come on! I know all about homeomorphism and algebraic topology and theory of functions, and I’ve read Riemann and Hu and Wilder and people like that. You can’t be all that much smarter than I am. What do you say?”

“Your Terran maths might be a handicap. You’d have to unlearn some of it.”

“So I’ll unlearn—what do you say?”

Lorrest smiled helplessly. “Well, we’re going to be airborne on autopilot for a few hours before we reach Vekrynn’s pied-à-terre, or whatever we’re looking for…Maybe I could force some elementary maths into your skull.”

“And I’ll pay you back,” Hargate promised. “I’ll try to force some elementary manners into yours.”

The structure was a featureless slab of concrete, like a single huge building block that had been dropped in a forest clearing. Mosses and vines had attached themselves to much of the surface without softening the uncompromising lines. Only in one place, where a fallen tree formed a sloping catwalk from ground to roof, had the environment made any headway in obliterating the unnatural intrusion.

“No attempt at concealment here,” Lorrest commented. “Either Vekrynn was confident nobody would get this far, or he realised that if they did they weren’t going to be put off.”

Hargate ran his gaze over the wall towards which he was being propelled and picked out the faint outline of a door which also seemed to be made of concrete. “It doesn’t look much like a country residence.”

“No, it has to be a store, a glorified strongbox. The only question is—what’s inside?”

“I’ll bet it takes more than one of your intelligent playing cards to open it.”

“Unbeliever!” Lorrest brought the wheelchair to a halt and went towards the door, already opening his wallet. “The locks are undoubtedly the best that Vekrynn could buy, borrow or steal, which means they were probably manufactured on Mollan around the time the Normans were invading England. Our establishment engineers are handicapped, of course. One thing about our longevity that nobody seemed to anticipate was the stultifying effect on designers—it’s very difficult to find materials that last as long as we do.”

Hargate sniffed noisily to express a bitter amusement. The tranquillity of the surrounding forest and the mellow coppery radiance from the setting sun reminded him of the long summer evenings of boyhood, those evenings on which time seemed to relent and cease its persecution, but he was not deceived. The caravan was still winding its way towards the dawn of nothing. In the solitude of the previous day he had persuaded himself that, as far as the mathematics of eternity was concerned, there was no difference between a lifespan of four decades and one of four millennia—all fractions with infinity as the bottom line had to equal zero—but one had to be in a certain mood to accept that kind of reasoning…

“Hurry up, for Chrissakes,” he said with a kind of nasal snarl. “It’s bloody boring sitting here.”

“Patience, patience,” Lorrest said, unperturbed, continuing to explore the surface of the door with one of his apparently ubiquitous white rectangles. “It’s just a matter of finding the right place for my calling card.”

A moment later he gave a low exclamation and stepped back as—with the loud report of a long-established seal being broken—the door retreated a short distance into the building. It stopped, then slid sideways to reveal a short corridor ending in another door which had a circular window. A pale amethyst light streamed through the glass. Has the light been on all the time, Hargate found himself wondering, his mind seizing on the irrelevancy, or is there a fridge door switch?

Holding the card aloft and slightly ahead of him, Lorrest walked slowly to the inner door. He pushed it open a little, satisfying himself that it was unlocked, and came back smiling. “It’s all right. I didn’t think Vekrynn would have gone in for automatic weapons, but associating with people like you has made me suspicious.”

“Yeah, you look suspicious.” His melancholia displaced by curiosity, Hargate urged his chair forward and through the outer doorway. Lorrest held the inner door open, allowing him to roll into a long chamber which occupied the entire volume of the building. The cold, delicately-tinted light had no obvious sources, coming equally from walls, floor and ceiling, making it difficult to judge dimensions and distances. Hargate, who had half-expected an Ali Baba’s cave of rare treasures, was slightly taken aback to find that the chamber was bare except for a single deeply-cushioned armchair which faced a row of seven metal boxes. The boxes were desk-sized, had numerous flush-mounted panels in varying shades of blue and were massively bolted to the floor, a detail which gave the whole assembly a curiously old-fashioned appearance. Hargate was reminded of twentieth century electrical power installations.

“What is it?” he said, not hiding his disappointment. “Some kind of relay station?”

“Hardly.” Lorrest went forward and stood for a moment by the chair, his face registering an excitement that was almost manic in its intensity. “If I’m not mistaken…Denny, I can’t believe this.”

“Believe what?” Hargate said irritably. “How about letting me in on…?”

Lorrest silenced him with an upraised hand and lowered himself into the deep chair. He touched no controls that Hargate could see, but a few seconds later a screen-like area of white luminescence sprang into existence in the air above the centre box. After a barely perceptible delay the screen blossomed with what Hargate had learned to recognise as Mollanian script.

“What we have here,” Lorrest said, speaking slowly, “is a copy of old man Vekrynn’s famous Notebook.”

“Is that all?”

Lorrest gave him a wry smile. “I don’t think you understand. Vekrynn is determined that his great opus, Analytical Notes on the Evolution of One Human Civilisation, will live forever, become part of the Mollanian heritage and all that stuff. He’s so afraid of the idea that it might be lost that he maintains, at his own expense, five up-dated copies of it on five different planets, and naturally he has made certain their whereabouts are known to everybody who could possibly be concerned.”

Hargate studied Lorrest’s face, trying to solve the puzzle it represented. “Is this a sixth copy that nobody knew about?”

“You’ve guessed it.”

“I still don’t see why you’re wetting yourself,” Hargate said. “From what you say, it would be in character for him to have a reserve copy.”

“Here? On a world far outside the human sector? On a world no other human knows about?” Lorrest shook his head as the writing on the screen began to change. “No, there has to be another reason. My guess is there’s something special about this one, and I’d like to know what it is.”

Hargate chuckled. “You’re becoming obsessed, man. Vekrynn isn’t worth the time or trouble.”

“It’s no trouble, and I’ve got a little time to kill.” Lorrest settled back in the chair and the characters blazoned on the insubstantial screen hovering above the middle cabinet began to change.

“Have fun,” Hargate said drily. Anxious to conserve what little power remained in his batteries, he rolled his chair away manually and began a circuit of the oblong chamber, hoping to find something of interest he had missed at first glance. The journey was disappointing—not even a scuff mark differentiated one blank wall from another. Losing interest in the interior of the building, he propelled himself back to the entrance, opened the door and went along the short corridor to the threshold of the alien world. The sun had not quite disappeared below the horizon, but there was little diffusion in the pure air and night was already advancing down the sky in merging bands of blue-green.

He shivered luxuriously, in spite of the ambient warmth, as he made yet another attempt to accommodate the knowledge that he, Denny Hargate, who as a child had not been able to drag himself more than a few city blocks without becoming exhausted, had travelled farther from Earth than any other member of his race. It was more than he could ever have expected. His private religion, his faith in that first miracle at Cotter’s Edge, had paid off in the form of something like a trip to heaven. If he had any cause for complaint it was that providence had not granted him the travelling companion he would have chosen—Gretana was the high priestess of Cotter’s Edge, and she should have been the one to accompany him. He could almost have reconciled himself to the prospect of dying in a couple of years or less on condition that he would be able to look at that incredible face every day, to replenish and fecundate himself and thus counteract the slow withering of his soul.

It was, however, most unlikely that he would ever see Gretana again. She was many light years distant and he had no way of even guessing the direction in the darkening vault of the sky, where the unfamiliar star groupings were again beginning to emerge. Could it be that loneliness was an unavoidable by-product of total mobility? From what he had learned of the Mollanians, theirs was a cool society in which individuals—freed from all the restraints of forced physical proximity—had forfeited the ability to form close personal relationships. Gretana saw her parents as remote and uninterested figures, which fitted his thesis, but another possible explanation lay in the Mollanians’ fantastic longevity. Lorrest had mentioned the difficulty of producing inert materials which could match a Mollanian lifespan; how then could a fragile thing like human passion hope to endure when the parties concerned went on for centuries, millennia, with no sign of change? Perhaps poignancy is all, Hargate mused. Perhaps…

The deep quavering sob which came from immediately behind him almost stopped Hargate’s heart.

He flailed himself around in his chair and saw Lorrest staring down at him. The Mollanian’s face was a near-luminous mask, flowing and distorting in an interplay of emotions Hargate was unable to identify. He shrank back into his chair, suddenly afraid, as Lorrest dropped to his knees, covered his face with his hands and began to sway, all the time emitting the inarticulate whimpers which can be wrested from humans by insupportable grief.

“You’ll never forgive us,” he said, after a time, each word a separate expression of pain. “You’ll never forgive what we have done to you.”

Feeling oddly self-conscious, prompted by instinct, Hargate leaned forward and gently placed his hands on Lorrest’s bowed head. And the tableau remained unchanged for many minutes, silhouetted in amethyst radiance, while the representative of one world made his confession and the representative of the other tried to give personal absolution.