Beyond Another Sun

(1971)*

Tom Godwin

Norman Grey watched the sun grow in the viewscreen until the lonely little control room of his ship was flooded with its light. It was a yellow sun, like the one that warmed Earth and would so soon destroy it, and the fourth planet was Earth-type. He decelerated, feeling the familiar eagerness to know if this would at last be the world he had came across a hundred and fifty light-years to find.

The Davis Field's warning light was a bright orange as he decelerated, touching danger red, and he wondered again if his ship might not be a flying bomb with an increasingly shorter fuse. However, there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. The Davis Field enclosed the ship and all it contained in a permeating protective force that permitted extremely rapid acceleration to near the speed of light and equally rapid deceleration. Interstellar journeys without the Field would require lifetimes.

He passed under the small, bright moon and made a swift orbit around the planet, still decelerating. Instruments aboard the ship surveyed and mapped as he did so.

He saw, with the old disillusionment, that it was not the world he sought. But it would serve as a vitally important way station for the Emigrant ships coming across the great void behind him.

He dropped down near the sea, on the green eastern portion of a vast continent, and the ship settled its broad tail fins in the grassy sod. He switched off the Davis Field. The warning light continued to burn, as he had expected. On Rona, the last world behind him, he had had to wait ten minutes for the malfunctioning unit's cumulative charge to drain away and let the Field collapse.

He switched on the hyperspace communicator that would connect him with the Advance Ship Board on Earth, a hundred and fifty light-years behind him. The output gauges of the ship's convertors swung far over as the tremendous energy needed to break through into hyperspace was produced.

The communicator beeped in reply almost at once and a blue light flashed on above it.

"Advance Ship Board," a voice said, one too young to be that of a Board Supervisor. "Your signal shows you to be Advance Ship Two—and your last world was Tone—"

It was a statement rather than a question and Grey thought: To Earth I'm not a human being. I'm a ship with neither body nor soul which speaks to them a few times out of a century ...

"Just a moment," the voice said. "Mr. Gault is coming now."

So Gault would be his new supervisor? Baker had been the one before. He had last talked to Baker from Rona, a fraction more than twenty weeks ago—which would have been twenty years for Baker. Before Baker there had been Lafayette—but Lafayette and the Board had not found it necessary to use the whips on Gnome ...

"Hello Grey," A voice spoke from the communicator, mature and assured. "My name is Gault and I'll take all your reports from now on. What have you found?"

Gault waited for him to commence his report and Norman Grey thought: Go ahead, Advance Ship Two. Report. We'll not waste time with any preliminary amenities such as, "Glad to hear from you again—gets pretty lonesome out there, doesn't it, old boy? ..."

He put the thought from his mind as childishly illogical. By the nature of the roles each had to play, there could be no camaraderie between an Advance Ship pilot and his Board Supervisor.

"Yellow Class G sun," Grey said. "This fourth planet is Earth-type but for being almost entirely desert in the land areas. There is only one ocean of any size—I set down near the western shore of it. There is a fairly large section of the eastern portion of this continent which seems to be ideal. In fact, it's the only green area of any size on the entire world.

"It seems that the only inhabited section is a valley at the north-east corner of this continent. A very high mountain range, running east and west, has the valley isolated from all this country. But someone has lived here in the past—I set down by the remains of a small village that has been abandoned for a long time."

"And you have found no reason for the abandonment?"

"None. All conditions here are ideally Earth-type. It's odd that the only inhabitants of this world should be in that hungry-looking valley to the north instead of here."

"Have you yet been outside your ship?" Gault asked.

"I'm going as soon as the warning light goes off. Has anything new been learned about that trouble? All Baker could tell me on Rona was that they felt sure that certain elements had deteriorated in the outside molecular-permeation field unit and the cure would be to install a new unit—which, of course, I didn't and won't have."

"Unfortunately, that is true. But you have not been alone with that trouble—Gonzales reported the same experience just after you left Rona."

"Is he still going on?"

"So far as we know, he is dead."

"Dead?" He looked again at the orange light. "Do you mean it killed him!"

"There is no evidence that the Field had anything to do with his disappearance."

"Do you have any idea what might have happened to him?"

"There is a possibility that he was injured much more severely than he thought on Ursa. Ursa is the remotely-Earth-type world he was approaching when his own warning light came on; so named by him because the dominant form of life was a very large and ferocious creature resembling a grizzly bear of Earth. A band of them caught him by surprise while he was inspecting an outcropping of radium ore and he barely escaped ahead of them into his ship, with what he reported as relatively minor injuries. He lifted ship as soon as he had given himself first-aid—there was no reason to stay any longer since Ursa had an atmosphere that would kill a human within a few days and could be used only as an emergency refueling station.

"When he reached the next world, four light-years further on, he reported his injuries to be healing well. He reported his survey of the new world to show it to be Earth-type essentially, possessing very little in the way of arable land, however—but also possessing nothing harmful. Human inhabitants consisted of a few small bands of nomads. But Gonzales was sure that with their help he could make that world into a way station of some value. He landed, to go out and get some soil and plant specimens as a final check before he contacted the natives.

"As soon as t he Davis Field collapsed he walked out of his ship, never to come back. We waited a hundred days, then recalled his ship by remote control."

"It's already been examined, of course?"

"Oh, yes," Gault answered. "It met the foremost Emigrant ship years ago and went on again with a new pilot as soon as the Field unit was replaced. But a very thorough inspection of the ship gave no clue as to what might have caused Gonzales not to return."

"And you're sure the Field unit had nothing to do with it?"

"Such appears impossible since the unit is concerned only with the Field's outer shell—and the entire Field had collapsed before Gonzales left the ship. And, so far as these faulty units go: the technicians who examine Gonzales' unit said that there would have been no further deterioration in it, nor will there be in yours. So there is nothing to worry about in that respect."

There was a pause, then Gault continued:

"As I said, there is a possibility that Gonzales was more severely injured than he realized. But we of the Board fear that there was some danger on this new world that was too well hidden for him to detect until it was too late. The replacement pilot will land there in a few months—we hope that he will be able to avoid Gonzales' fate so he can make that world in to a way station. Success or failure can mean life or death for those on the Emigrant ships behind."

"None of the Advance men have found anything of much value, then?" Grey asked.

"Only a few worlds that can be used as way stations—and too few of those. The situation is becoming very critical."

"There is an area in space—beginning about two hundred light-years from here—where yellow suns are much more numerous. Maybe the world we're all looking for will be there."

"I hope so," Gault said. "But the Emigrant ships behind you will have to have food and fuel long, long before they can go that far. It is imperative that your present world be made into a way station."

"I know—that's why I'm here," he said, then asked the hopeful question he always asked, "Have the new observations given any chance for Earth?"

"No, Earth's sun and that wandering dark star will collide twenty-five years from now. It is inevitable."

"I was hoping ..." He sighed and said, "When the warning light goes off, I'll go outside. By the way, what would happen if I should walk out into the Field now?"

"So far as we know," Gault answered, "you would be transformed into disassociated atoms. Don't do it."

"I don't intent to. I'll report later, when I have something definite to report."

When the orange light vanished he took the elevator down to the airlock. He pushed the buttons that would drop the boarding ramp and open the airlock.

A few seconds later he stepped out onto the top of the ramp, into the sweet-scented air of early summer. He stood for a little while, observing the green, flowering beauty of the land before him. It was an Earth-type paradise—but there was not enough of it to give a home to what would soon be all that were left of the human race on Earth ...

Then he heard the lark and for a moment he had the wild conviction that he had travelled in a circle and returned to Rona.

It was suddenly singing to him from a tree nearby—the same golden lark that had sung so gayly that emerald dawn on Rona when Thorlita had held to him crying, and said: "I wish I was as small as it so I could hide on your ship and go with you ..."

Then he shook his head, as though that would drive away the lonely memories of that morning, and said aloud, "Coincidence. Similar environments produce similar life forms. That other lark died long ago."

It was true that there were strange things in the galaxy, such as the fact that human life upon Earth-type worlds, no matter what that world might be, would be essentially the same as human life upon all other Earth-type worlds. There was a theory that all human life had originated on some distant world of the past and that some approaching catastrophe, such as a sun about to go into the nova stage, had caused that world to send out small ships in all directions to establish colonies upon all suitable worlds found.

Animal life upon Earth-type worlds, however, was only similar from one world to the next and not identical. Except the lark—

It was only somewhat similar to t he larks of Earth but it was exactly the same as the one he had seen on Rona so many years ago.

He went on down the boarding ramp and toward the nearest stone building, passing under the tree where the lark was still singing.

It was also strange that the song should be exactly the same, note for note, as that of the lark on Rona.

He went into the ruined village area. Vegetation grew as thickly inside the tumbled stone walls as outside, including large trees, and he estimated the village had been abandoned for almost two hundred years. He found numerous flint arrow heads and much pottery, most of it still unbroken. The metal locator he had brought with him disclosed a large number of artifacts hammered from native copper. All of it indicated a very sudden and unanticipated abandonment but he found nothing to show the reason for such a sudden flight.

He went back to the ship and set down at several other points farther inland to procure soil and plant specimens. He had taken his last specimen and was in the ship again when a nagging subconscious feeling of something wrong resolved itself into a question:

Animal life was abundant in the green land—why had he seen no birds of any kind other than the golden lark?

He lifted ship and approached the towering range that lay like a mighty barrier east and west across the north end of the continent, its lowest peak twenty thousand feet above sea level. He went east, along the south side of if, until he came to the sea again.

There the mountain ran out into the ocean for almost a hundred miles, still towering and show-clad, before it began breaking up into a series of rocky islands. He raised higher, to go over the range, and the valley came into view.

It set deep and narrow between the gigantic range on the south side and the high plateau to the north. It was checker-boarded with fields, now green with what for the valley would be only early spring, irrigation ditches leading to most of them from a very small river which ran down the middle of the valley. He saw that the north side of the mountain range was so steep, with the strata dipping to the south, that it would afford very little watershed for the river.

There were twenty towns and villages scattered up the length of the valley, two of the towns larger than any of the others. One was the lower end of the valley, just above the place where the river began dropping in a series of white falls to the sea a mile below. The other was at the upper end of the valley, where the river broke up into tributary creeks.

He stopped at a point where the glare of t he sun would conceal the ship from those in the valley and studied it with the viewscreens at magnification. The stage of development seemed to be roughly equivalent to that of Western Europe during the Fourteenth Century. Several of the towns seemed to have small manufacturing industries of some kind although he saw nothing resembling machines. The only traffic on the dusty roads consisted of those on foot and those riding in wooden carts pulled by animals resembling water buffalo.

He left the valley when he was done, to go north up over the plateau. It was a cold, bleak land, even in spring, with no vegetation visible through the snow but for some stunted bushes and with no sign of life.

He returned to the valley and decided upon the upper of the two largest towns as the one for his first contact with the natives. He went to it and dropped down toward a level, grassy area near the edge of it.

Two children, playing not far away, became aware of his silently descending ship only when its shadow fell across them. For a moment they were two tiny, fore-shortened statues, staring upward with startled, incredulous faces. Then they were gone, their bare legs flashing in the sunlight as they ran in terrified flight, their treble shrieks of alarm coming in through the audio pickup mounted beside the ship's scanner pickup.

He took the elevator down to the largest room in the ship, called a "reception room" for lack of a better name. Here he picked up the three-dimensional recorder-projector and took it into the ship's library where, in addition to books and microfilm, there was an immense amount of special-purpose 3-D tape. He loaded the projector with what he would need, buckled the projector's remote control belt around him, then put on the grey cloak that, with its modification of the Davis Field, would protect him from any quickly-shot arrows.

When he stepped out through the airlock, he found the natives already waiting for him.

Five men were determinedly approaching the ship, no more than sixty feet away. One, scarred and muscular and apparently the chief, walked a little in advance of the others. All of them had their bows ready in their hands. Grey could see other bowmen ready in the nearby trees and there was hurried movement in the visible portion of the town as defense positions were taken up.

The five men before him halted in their tracks at his appearance and brought up their bows in unmistakable warning. He descended the ramp and stopped ten feet short of them. They watched him with wary suspicion, especially the blonde bowman on the extreme right.

"I come as a friend," he said to them. "But for you to know that, I first have to learn your language."

He set the projector on the ground beside him and motioned to his left, where the projected scene would appear. "Watch," he said, and pressed a button on the control belt.

A five-foot sphere of life and movement appeared with magical abruptness, six feet to his left and just above the ground.

The four bowmen shot an instant later, not at the sphere but at him. A stunned expression flashed across their faces as their arrows, shot hard and true at close range, shattered into splinters when they touched the gray cloak.

"Rath ten'ok herov!" the leader said in quick, sharp command, motioning to the sphere. They lowered their bows and looked at it.

The sphere showed a native and himself seated in the grass beside the ship. The projection sphere's image was in front of them, various scenes and symbols appearing in it. He and the native watched the symbols in the sphere and they could be seen asking questions of each other and making notations in the books each held.

The leader, already comprehending what the scene represented, gave a command to one of the bowmen. The bowman turned and trotted back toward the village.

He reappeared a few minutes later, walking slowly to keep pace with an old man. Grey wondered who he might be—priest or wise man or sorcerer?

The old man stopped before him, his whiskers white with the years, his face aged and wrinkled, but his blue eyes bright and young and burning with curiosity; curiosity untouched by any form of fanaticism.

The old man wasted no time with preliminaries. Instead he pointed to Grey, then to the ship, then upward with a sweeping, questioning gesture. The question was obvious: Where are you from?

Grey touched a button in the control belt and the scene in the sphere changed, to become the star-studded night sky as seen from the old man's own world. There was a constellation made up of ten blue-white stars to form a brilliant circle, a red star glowing like a ruby in the center. It was far beyond the red star to Earth but he could not tell them that until he learned their language.

A speck of silver light moved out from the red star and the stars receded as the speck enlarged and became his ship. There were startled exclamations from the bowmen, then, and they repeated the word or name, Monomus, several times as they stared at him in an oddly intent way.

Only the old man seemed unaffected. When the scene faded away he sat down on the ground and produced a table of rough paper and a pencil-like writing instrument. He looked at Grey with an expression that said, Let's go!

It was the invitation Grey had wanted; to ask questions while the recorder watched and listened.

He gave the Terran word for each object that appeared in the sphere and the old man spoke the equivalent word in his own language. At first only the nouns were required, then verbs were gradually introduced as action was brought into the material. As the hours went by the subject matter became more and more complex.

It was dusk when he shut off the projector and rose to his feet. He spoke the words he had been careful to learn, "You—me—tomorrow—here."

The old man nodded emphatically. "Tomorrow—here."

Back in the ship he ate his long-delayed lunch and went to the reception room where he mounted the projector on the table there. Then he went to the medical supplies room and dialed the particular form of M.I. drug he would need.

The drug and a polysyllabic technical name but it was better known as the M.I. or Memory Implanter drug. It was a versatile drug and could be used in many different ways. It was always used by Advance Ship pilots for the learning of a new language. And the M.I. drug had, he suspected, played a very important role in the psychological-emotional conditioning of Advance Ship pilots.

He went back to the chair by the table in the reception room and took the M.I. capsule.

A pleasant lassitude spread over him as the drug took almost immediate effect. He turned on the projector and his mind seemed to float dreamily away, only dimly aware of the projection sphere and the reproduced actions and words of himself and the old man.

But, under the influence of the drug, his subconscious mind was absorbing and implanting in memory cells every word that had been spoken.

When he came out of the dream-like trance he had a rudimentary vocabulary in the alien language and had learned a little about them.

They called themselves the Vala and their world was named Hardeen. The old man's name was Talmok and he was, apparently, the local wise man. The leader Grey had med was the sub-chief, Gondo. The chief, Torgeth, was ill and presently confined to bed.

He also learned that the constellation he had flown through was of religious significance to the Vala and that he was going to have trouble as the result.

He spent the following days with Talmok and on the night of the fourth day his vocabulary was virtually complete and he had learned enough about the Vala to make his first full report to Gault:

"The Vala are recently past the bronze age and now know how to make fairly good carbon steel. They have good workers in various fields—ceramics, glass, wood, textiles, and so on. They have a little paper mill that turns out a product that is rough but serves the purpose. I'll have to show them how to use kaolin as a filler—there is none in this valley so I'll bring them in some from the country to the south.

"The Vala now number about fifty thousand. They call that high mountain that forms the south wall of their valley The Barrier. The Vala got here about a thousand years ago by sailing from that desert continent to the east. It seems that a long-continued drought and scarcity of game forced the entire population to set sail in crude ships for what they hoped would be a better land to the west. Storms destroyed most of the ships before the survivors reached the bay at the lower end of this valley. The valley, then, was virgin, with plenty of game, so they stayed. It was a far better place to live than the barren land they had come from.

But as the centuries went by the population increased—and the game decreased—and there were disputes over which villages owned which hunting areas. A long period of wars set in. Conditions got steadily worse and an attempt was made to migrate to the country south of the Barrier. Their little ships made the voyage around the end of the Barrier without trouble but before their new village was even built the other danger appeared. Only a very few of the emigrants survived long enough to set sail and come back to the valley. They reported that an insect—the description sounds like that of a green moth—came out in swarms from their hatching place in some kind of a silvery bush. These insects were bloodsuckers and their bite was fatal. The disease struck as a severe spinal pain and killed within three days at the most.

"There was nothing for the Vala to do, then, but continue to try to survive in the Valley. It was at that time that a man named Monomus appeared on the scene. He was one of those one-in-two-thousand-years geniuses, like Leonardo Da Vinci, and he changed their entire way of life. He taught them how to transform soft copper into hard bronze, how to cultivate grain and other crops, he gave them a phonetic alphabet to replace their hieroglyphics, and so on.

"He was already a legend with the Vala when he died. As time went by following his death they became convinced that he had not been a mortal man but had been sent by their god to teach them a new way of life. His writings became their bible. But one bit of advice and warning he gave them is going to cause me trouble. He warned them never to try to go south of the Barrier again."

"How seriously do you think that warning will interfere with your work?" Gault asked.

"I'm not sure, yet. They are afraid of that country south of the Barrier, of course, but there are other factors to help outweigh their fear. The valley no longer has any arable land for new fields—they are already into the beginning of the end. If a drought comes this year—and Talmok thinks it will—there will be starvation and wars over hunting grounds this winter. The Vala know what might be in store for them but they are helpless to do anything about it.

"Selvar, the priest of this town—Thylon—is already my enemy. He distrusts me for several reasons, including the fact that on the first day I gave the impression that I had come from the central star of a constellation they call the Jeweled Circle. According to their religion, that is the location of their heaven and that is where Monomus now watches down upon them. My supposedly having flown through the center of their heaven—without having seen anything out of the ordinary—is not going to set well with the priesthood.

"Tomorrow Chief Torgeth is to meet with me—he's been sick in bed, as I told you—and I asked Talmok to arrange for all of us to meet with Selvar. Then I'll see what I can do to get things straightened out."

"Report immediately after your meeting tomorrow," Gault said. "Hardeen absolutely must be made into a way station—it's the first really good way station world found. Also, since Advance Ship Three has found so few, and such poor, way station worlds, we are ordering four of its Emigrant ships to change course and go to Hardeen."

"Four?" he exclaimed, and thought: That will make eighteen ships behind me—the lives of nine hundred thousand in my hands ...

"I know," Gault said. "Your own fourteen ships should have been enough responsibility."

"If they could ever make a hyperspace ship's drive, back there on Earth. Are they still trying?"

"They're still trying," Gault said. "It's not hard to transmit electromagnetic vibrations instantaneously through hyperspace, once you learn how and have the power, but to project a material body through it—well, they're still trying."

There was a resignation in Gault's tone that implied he did not expect success to come within the short time left for Earth.

Well ... it's time for me to start getting ready for tomorrow's meeting," Grey aid. "By the way—I forget to mention it before—but there was a minor mystery when I first landed. There are no birds of any kind in this valley and I saw none south of the Barrier, yet there was a lark outside my ship ..."

He told of the incident and Gault said, "It was probably one of a species so rare they are seldom seen. Either that or the Rona lark flew into your ship without you noticing it, before you closed the airlock."

"And then lived over twenty weeks with neither food nor water?"

"Perhaps Rona birds can go into hibernation whenever necessary. The ability to do this has been found to be a fairly common characteristic upon several other worlds."

"Yes—yes, I suppose that's what happened."

He left the ship late the next morning. It was the weekly Rest Day and the priest would not come to the ship until after he had conducted the services in the nearby church, if he came at all.

Talmok was waiting outside the ship, another man with him. He was a tall man of perhaps sixty, wide of shoulder and hard of jaw. He watched Grey descend the ramp with impassive composure and Grey knew he would be the chief.

"This is Torgath," Talmok said in introduction.

He said no more and it was, Grey thought, an introduction logically sufficient in its one-sided simplicity. Earthmen were rare enough on Hardeen to need no designation as such.

He responded to the introduction with the proper Valan expression: "I am honored, Chief Torgath."

Torgath's black eyes and weatherbeaten face remained expressionless, showing neither enmity nor friendship, as he made the formal reply: "The honor is mine, Stranger Grey." Then he added, "So far, you have learned much about us and we have learned almost nothing about you."

It was not stated as an accusation but as a fact and he said to Torgath, "First, I had to learn your language. This I have done, and today I will tell you where I came from and why I am here." He looked at Talmok. "The priest, Selvar, will not come?"

"He would not come," Talmok said. "But he would not refuse to listen if you went to his house."

He took the projector, which he had already loaded with the tape material he would need, and Torgeth led the way toward the priest's house, the location of which turned out to be at the extreme outer edge of the town and not far from the ship.

One of the tall, buffalo-like cows was grazing along the way, a small calf beside her. The cow raised her head and watched Grey pass with belligerent suspicion.

"Selvar's cow," Talmok remarked. "She doesn't trust you, either."

They came to Selvar's house, one made of gray stone and half covered with green vines. It had a deceptively homey and friendly look to it.

The door opened as they reached it and for the first time he saw Selvar.

He had expected to be met by someone along the order of a snarling, wild-eyed fanatic. Instead, the gray-haired Selvar was coldly dignified, obviously of high intelligence, with a face that under ordinary circumstances would have been kind and gentle.

However, there was only intense dislike in his eyes as he looked at Grey and then said to Torgeth, "So you bring him here?"

"I, myself, asked for this meeting with you," Grey said. "I want to tell you who I am and why I am here."

Selvar smiled very thinly, "Perhaps I have already guessed."

"You condemn him without reason!" Talmok protested. "He is no demon."

Selvar said, with a touch of haughtiness, "Is it usually agreed that priests are more capable of recognizing evil than atheists."

"Then exorcise him," Talmok said, with a toothless, malicious grin. "Or else let us inside your house to hear what he has to say."

Selvar stepped aside and said coldly to Grey, "You may enter."

They went inside, into a room that was severely plain. A table was in the center of the room, a book and two tall candle sticks on it and four chairs around it.

He set the projector on the table and said to the icily watching Selvar, "The candlesticks will be in the way. Would you move them, please?"

Selvar turned to the curtained doorway across the room and called, "Ritha!"

The curtains fell apart at once, as though someone had been holding them together, and a girl of perhaps sixteen came into the room.

Despite himself, he could not keep from staring for a moment at her; at the appealing prettiness of the heart-shaped child-woman face, framed by curly brown hair, from which a pair of wide blue eyes watched him in the manner of a fawn torn between curiosity and the temptation to run.

"Clear the table, Ritha." Selvar ordered.

"Yes, Grandfather," she answered in a low voice and went to the table. She lowered her head to avoid Grey's eyes as she reached for the candlestick nearest him and he said gently, "I won't bite you, child." She did not answer nor look up, but took the book and candlesticks back through the curtained doorway.

A few seconds later, when he glanced up from adjusting the projector, the curtains were being held together again but for a small opening about five feet above the floor where a glue eye was watching him.

He arranged the chairs in a semi-circle before the table and they seated themselves, Torgeth and Talmok with curiosity, Selvar with frozen-faced patience.

"There will be many things you won't fully understand," he told them, switching on the projector, "but all of it will be true."

The crystal sphere appeared before them, reduced to a diameter of three feet. Talmok had known what to expect but there was flicker of surprise across the formerly impassive face of Torgeth and the icy composure of Selvar was momentarily affected. The sphere clouded, then cleared to show a planet in starlit space, a yellow moon near it.

"That is my world, Earth," he said. "It is very far from here—eight hundred and eighty-two thousand billion of your lechels—"

"Wait!" Selvar said. "Did you not at first claim to have come from the Jeweled Circle?"

There was triumph waiting behind Selvar's cold stare and Torgeth was watching him closely.

"I was not within the boundaries of the Circle," he said. "My course was along curve that passed outside it. I had to first learn your language to tell you that that was only the general direction in which I came."

Selvar's lips tightened with disbelief but he said only, "Continue."

"I am here to offer the Vala a new way of life," he began. "I can free you from your prison here, and the dawn-to-dark labor that allows you so little free time for improving your circumstances. Science, and the machines and products of science, can be yours ..."

Centuries had passed in the projection sphere when the last scene was shown. He shut it off, knowing already that he had only wasted his time so far as convincing Selvar was concerned.

"You showed us your rise from ox carts, such as our own, to ships that fly through space." Torgeth said. "You showed us machines that can work for us and give us the chance to live instead of merely existing. And you say we can have such machines?"

"Yes. But you will have to work for them—I cannot materialize them for you."

"Work is something we have always known. Now, there are no new lands in the valley for cultivation. If we had machines such as you showed us, we could make the present land produce much more. I have seen hunger among my people—I do not want to see it again."

"A moment, Torgeth," Selvar said. "Before you too readily accept his offer, let me ask a question."

Selvar turned to Grey. "You claim you traveled almost nine hundred billion lechels?" he asked.

"Yes."

"And you traveled that fantastic distance in only the years of your age?"

"In a way—and in a way it required almost five times the years of my age."

All of them stared at him.

"I traveled at almost the speed of light, which is about nine hundred thousand times the speed of sound. Time is not a fixed thing—it varies with the motion of an object. When an object travels at a very high velocity, such as my ship at close to the speed of light, there is a difference between the apparent time passage for that object and that of a relatively stationary object, such as a planet. This is known as the time dilation and the time difference we call the tau lag. My ship's speed is such that the time difference is fifty to one. So, while a hundred and fifty years went by on Earth since I left there, only three years passed for me on my ship."

There was an uncomprehending silence, in which all three continued to stare at him, then Selvar said with calm decisiveness to Talmok.

"Can even you, Talmok, believe that incredible statement?"

"It's true that I don't understand this tau lag," Talmok admitted. "But neither do I understand how his heavy ship can fly—and it flies, doesn't it?"

Selvar's lips again tightened with undiminished disbelief but he did not argue further. He turned to Grey and said, "Do you have any more—explanations—to give us?

He sighed and thought: I might as well take the bull by the horns and let Selvar know the worst.

"I can give the Vala some things of immediate value," he said, "such as the quick-growing grain, fruit and vegetable seeds in my ship which will mature in only a fraction of the time required by your own food plants. But, of more importance than anything else, I can make it possible for the Vala to live in that rich, green land south of the Barrier."

Selvar recoiled as though he had been struck and drew in his breath with a sharp, hissing sound.

"So that is your true mission, you emissary of the devil!" Selvar's eyes blazed. "You would have us do the thing Monomus most forcefully forbid us to do!"

"It was forbidden only because of the paralysis-moths," Grey said. "I can give the Vala a medicine that will make them immune to the bite of the moths."

"No!" Selvar said with firm finality. "It is forbidden to go there. We shall not defy the commandment of Monomus because an alien creature promises us a paradise there!"

"I promise no effortless paradise. I promise the opportunity to work and achieve a new and much better way of life. I promise you need never again have the famines and wars that will surely come if you refuse to leave this valley."

Torgeth spoke with slow thoughtfulness. "You speak the truth when you foretell what will happen to us if we remain in this valley. I would like to believe your promises—but I am not sure of you. You want something in return—what is it?"

"I want the Vala to give some of my people the chance to live."

To their expressions of surprise and question he explained:

"You know how the planets of a sun circle around it in their orbits. There can be still another movement. The sun of Earth, and all the planets around it, are moving through space in the direction of a star called Mu Herculis at a speed of twelve miles a second. That speed amounts to four times the distance from Hardeen to its sun each year.

"A hundred and sixty-six years ago something a long way ahead of the solar system was detected. It was a dark star—a sun that had burned itself out and had only the dense, dark core left. Its course and speed were such that it would collide with the sun at the end of a hundred and ninety-one years. When this happens, the sun will be transformed into a nova and Earth and all the other planets will be turned into cinders."

There was a thoughtful quiet following his words, which Talmok broke:

"Then your world and your people will die twenty-five years from now? But how can we here on Hardeen help them?"

"Shortly after discover of the dark star," he said, "two things necessary for interstellar travel were developed: the Davis Field and the Gravineric Drive. Construction of Advance ships—such as my own—and of Emigrant ships began then. The Emigrant ships are very large, each carrying fifty thousand people, and each of the five Advance ships has a line of Emigrant ships following. The Emigrant ships in each line are spaced about ten light-years apart and so each line reaches almost back to Earth.

"The job of the Advance ship pilots is to try to find an Earth-type world to which all the emigrants from Earth can finally go. So far, no suitable world has been found. They were either too barren or else already densely populated. So, for the Emigrant ships to keep going, the Advance ship men have to find and prepare way station worlds for them, where they can reprovision and refuel. The Emigrant ships use enormous quantities of fuel. Also, since they are not as fast as the Advance ships, the tau lag advantage for them is not as great. Thirty light-years is as far as an Emigrant ship can go before it has to have a way station for food and fuel."

"I see," Torgeth said. "And you want Hardeen to be a way station?"

"Yes. That is what I ask in return for what I will do for the Vala."

Torgeth's black eyes studied him intently. "Why do you ask when you and your people could have the land south of the Barrier without asking—without even our knowledge?"

"There are two reasons. One is the fact that by not helping you, when we could so easily do so, we would in a way be responsible for the hardship and suffering that are in store for you if you are not given the chance to leave this valley. The other reason is a very practical one: the Emigrant ships will need the food, metals, and other supplies that your development of that country south of the Barrier would make available."

Torgeth considered the statement, his eyes never leaving Grey's. "If your code of ethics is what you say, the Vala would have much to gain by helping you." He turned to the others. "What do you think?"

"We have nothing but hardship to lose and everything to gain," Talmok said. "We would be fools to refuse."

Selvar stood up with frozen-faced, ominous calm.

"I can see," he said in a voice that matched his face, "that it is useless for me to remind you two"—he looked at Torgeth and Talmok—"of the warnings I gave you earlier this evening. Monomus, above all else, forbid us ever to attempt again to go south of the Barrier. He warned us, in The Chapter of Prophecies, that the time would come when we would be urged to go there and that would be the test of our faith in him. This is the test he predicted and you two have already failed it!"

Selvar looked at Grey with the implacable hatred of a man in the presence of something inhuman and viciously dangerous.

"I shall see to it that the Church of Monomus arouses every Valan to the peril to us that you and your honey-coated lies represent. Now—go!"

Grey rose to his feet. There was no use to try anymore to reason with the priest. Selvar was convinced that the Vala stood at the crossroads of Salvation and Damnation and a method other than reason would have to be used to change his mind.

The other method, by the human mind's own nature, was such that the mind was either changed or lost. But there was no alternative.

He left them to their own thoughts after excusing himself to Torgeth and Talmok in such manner as was possible under the circumstances. He saw that Selvar's attitude was already causing Torgeth to waver from his former trust. Only Talmok seemed to be unaffected.

The sun was invisible behind dark clouds and a fine mist of rain was falling as he left Selvar's house. He had not gone far when he heard the voice of Talmok calling behind him. He waited under a tree and the old man caught up with him, breathing a little hard from his hurrying.

"Torgeth and Selvar are still talking," Talmok said. "Selvar is a good man—although we argue, we are friends. But he sincerely believes you represent danger to the Vala and he already almost has Torgeth fully convinced of it."

"I was afraid of that. I had hoped he would have a more open mind."

"He has an exceptionally intelligent mind—ordinarily. But the last famine-war, fifteen years ago, took the lives of every member of his family except his granddaughter—Ritha, the girl you say. He loved his family above all else and after they were gone he began to believe their lives had been taken to punish him for the lives that he, himself, had taken in the war. He joined the priesthood and ever since has been convinced that only absolute obedience to the Book of Monomus can ever save the Vala."

"What about the prophecies he mentioned, regarding going south of the Barrier and a test of the Valan faith?"

"There is actually nothing specific, except by a man's own personal interpretation. Monomus warned against going south of the Barrier for the excellent reason that it would be death to do so. He warned against listening to those who would put forth any social or economic plan not based on the plow and hunting bow. This was not prophecy but only common sense. How else, in this valley, could we exist but by the plow and hunting bow?"

It was not a question that required an answer and Talmok continued:

"I know what will happen to us if we stay here. I am also intelligent enough to know that to present a young race like mine with your own mechanized, complex way of life might produce dangerous problems. A sharp knife is very useful for many things—but you don't hand one to a child who has had no experience with one."

"An Advance ship pilot is trained to teach the dangers of sharp edges. Also, to make sure that those who go south of the Barrier are the desired type, there will be tests to pick our the very best."

"What about the fact—and I know it will be a fact—that the Vala will be guided for several centuries to come by the Earthmen?" Talmok asked. "Do you think the Vala will keep on approving of that?"

"There are especially grained groups on each Emigrant ship who will know how to make the Vala believe that everything they do for their own good—and the good of the coming Emigrant ships—is strictly by their own volition."

"It seems to be a good plan," Talmok said. He stood hunched against the rain a little while, staring back toward Selvar's house. "But why do you tell me this? I know it is not something you will tell all the Vala."

"Leaders and teachers for the new colony must be selected. There will have to be men of intelligence and conscience whose thinking is neither distorted by wrong emotions not limited to short-range or selfish motives. You are such a man. We will need a great many more."

"I appreciate that," Talmok said. "But you will never succeed against the opposition of Selvar. He has more influence with the churches than any priest in the valley."

The sound of a girl's voice came to them and Grey saw that Ritha was just leaving Selvar's house with Torgeth, to walk with him toward the town proper.

"Does she live there with her grandfather?" he asked, thinking of his forthcoming job.

"She lies in town with her aunt," Talmok answered, "but she visits her grandfather often and she studies under him—we have no public schools, as you know—and she almost always cooks him the customary Rest Day dinner." Talmok sighed and looked up at the dark sky. "I had better go—old bones grow stiff when left out in the rain. Not that this drizzle is really the rain we need—it will probably be hot and dry in the morning."

When he was back in the ship he took the recorder-projector into the library and recorded the material he wanted from among the endless variety stored there. He then set the projector in its place in the reception room and impatiently waited the hours until darkness.

When it was fully dark outside, with the black clouds making it even darker, he took the needle-gun—which shot paralyzing slivers of gelatin—and went outside the ship. He did not wear the protective cloak. Its considerable weight and bulk might handicap him. Furthermore, its pale gray might make him too conspicuous in the darkness.

He went out into the night and came to the grassy area where the buffalo cow had been grazing. She was still there, her calf beside her.

At his sudden appearance in the dark she snorted in alarm. Then he saw the bulk of her coming at him in an astonishingly swift charge, her head lowered and her hooves ripping at the sod.

He brought up the needle gun and fired three times in quick succession. He jumped aside as the cow lurched past him and fell heavily to the ground.

The night was rent by a high-pitched bleating and the calf was running toward its mother, another bleat coming from its throat. It seemed to him it was a noise loud enough to awaken the entire town and he shot twice at the calf. Its bleat broke with sharp abruptness and it fell beside its mother.

He continued on his way, moving with slow caution.

There was a rectangle of light from a curtained window in Selvar's house. He avoided it and came in from the corner of the house, wondering if Selvar might not already have heard the noise and already be outside to look and listen.

He saw a darker blot of shadow halfway along the length of the wall and wondered if it could be Selvar. There was one way to find out—

He swung the needle gun up and pressed the trigger.

There was an almost inaudible hiss as the gelatin needle was ejected and the shadow melted to the ground. He went to it, to find that it was Selvar with his face turned unseeingly up into the rain.

He was leaning over Selvar when a voice spoke from just inside the wall, low and tense.

"Can you see what frightened the calf, Grandfather? And what was that sound you just made?"

He raised up again, recognizing it as the voice of the girl, Ritha. She had come back—

"What was it? Grandfather—answer me!"

He had started to take the first step away from Selvar, feeling for the door in the darkness, when a glow of light suddenly flooded across both of them as a door he had missed was suddenly thrown open.

The girl stood frozen and staring for a moment in the doorway, one hand clutching a shirt knife. He noticed, absently, that the room inside was a kitchen and that there were some vegetables on the table inside that she had been peeling.

She drew a quick, desperate breath to scream and he caught her by the shoulder and clamped his hand over her mouth before any sound could emerge. She tried to wrench free, twisting in his grip with the agility of a frightened cat. The shoulder he did not hold jerked free and her arm came back. Something licked along his throat like a tongue of fire—the knife she still held. It drove for his throat again and he caught both her hands in one of his own.

"Don't be afraid," he said, feeling the hot blood running down his neck and thinking of how near he had come to traveling across a hundred and fifty light-years of space to have his jugular vein laid open by a paring knife i the hand of a teen-age girl.

She tried fiercely to jerk loosed from his grip. "You killed him—"

Again she drew a breath to scream. The needle gun was in his hand and there was no alternative. The muzzle of it was against her side when he pulled the trigger and she sagged limply. He lifted her across the threshold, laid her beside her grandfather, and closed the door.

The girl's unexpected appearance had complicated things and he would have no choice but to take them both to the ship. He dared not leave her, for someone to find in a sleep from which she could not be awakened. The entire town would soon know of it, and know that Selvar had disappeared. If he took them both, any chance caller would merely assume they were gone visiting somewhere.

He pocketed the needle gun and hoisted the priest to his shoulder, thankful than he, himself, was a large man and the priest was not. He scooped up the limp body of the girl and slid her onto the other shoulder, to start walking heavily back toward the ship under his double burden.

He passed the large, dark bulk that was the buffalo and the smaller bulk of her calf. As he plodded, he speculated upon the reaction of the Vala should a sudden flash of lightening reveal him—carrying and passing what they could only assume to be his night's kill.

Back in the ship he put Selvar in a chair near the table in the reception room and placed the girl in another chair nearby. He washed the blood from his throat and sprayed it with a self-congealing antiseptic.

He went back to the table, where the hypodermic syringe was already filled with the particular form of M.I. drug needed, and injected it into Selvar's arm. He turned out the reception room lights and turned on the projector.

Selvar opened his eyes as the M.I. drug neutralized the effect of the needle gun and at the same time a golden sphere from the projector blossomed into being before him, shimmering and iridescent. Selvar stared in hypnotized fascination. The mind-changing was ready to begin.

The procedure would be similar to that of learning a new language, with one important difference, he, Grey, had needed only to fix certain data—the Valan language—in his memory, without emotion. Selvar's mind already contained the necessary data but it was data not in accord with the philosophy in which he so fervently believed. Selvar lived in a simple, orderly universe which his interpretations of the Book of Monomus had created for him and anything which would refute what he knew to be absolute truth and right was to be rejected as invalid and evil. His beliefs were an integral part of his emotional nature and could not be changed by reason or logic. Nothing could break down the emotion-created barrier but other, stronger, emotions.

He stood beside Selvar and spoke to him as the golden sphere shimmered on:

"There is a decision you will have to make for your people, Selvar. Will you let them have the green land to the south, or will you force them to stay in this prison valley where there will again be the ashes of burned villages under the winter snow?"

The golden light rippled outward and dissolved. In its place came a scene of blue sky and sunlight over verdant hills and wide, fertile valleys.

"This is the land south of the Barrier. There is game in the hills, fish in the streams, wild fruit and vegetables in the valleys. Wherever you look there is rich land that has never yet known the touch of a plow. There are mineral resources with which the Vala could build machines to labor in the fields and factories for them. There would be no hunger or wars in this land, Selvar; no hatred and violence and suffering. Look—watch and listen—this is the way of life you could give your people ..."

The music that had been a soft background surged upward; the violins singing in their high, sweet voices, the brass and reed instruments weaving a pattern of harmony and counter-harmony that was like a tapestry of jeweled threads. Scene followed scene; blue lakes and shady streams, fields green with young crops and fields golden with harvest, children laughing as they ran and played in the sun. The music rose, faster in tempo, until it filled the room with its gaiety.

"This can be the future for the Vala—but you would deny it to them."

The music poised on a crescendo, faded, and was gone.

"That land was not created for only the wild animals to know. Now that the Vala can be made immune to the bite of the moths, Monomus would not forbid them to go there and want them to stay and starve in their cold little valley."

The violins came in again, not singing as they had before, but sobbing as a woman might cry in the night. The reeds whimpered in soft accompaniment. The green hills and blue sky began to recede and fade away.

` "Life, and laughter, and peace—you, not Monomus, would deny your people these."

The scene in the sphere died and was gone. The violins died with it but for one last note which trembled in the air like the wail of a lost child.

"Gone, Selvar, because you so will it. Instead, you want your people to have this—"

The sphere came to life with the surging of men as they fought in a village street, with the sound of shouting, the hard ring of steel striking steel, the soft thud of arrows striking flesh.

"In times of hunger there is a way for a village to increase its food supply. This is the way it's done. Watch them, Selvar. The defenders are so outnumbered that there can be but one outcome to the battle. Then there will be rejoicing and peace."

Swords rang louder and the outnumbered defenders were cut down. Soon only a small group was left, standing back to back in the street as they made the last futile defense. One was a thin-faced boy in his early teens who was swinging a sword with both hands, without skill but with desperate fury. The sword cut into the shoulder of a muscular attacker who wheeled around with a snarl of pain and ran his sword through the boy. The boy fell and the man smiled down at him as he writhed on the ground and tugged at the sword that had been run through his stomach.

"The boy tried to be a man, Selvar. He will die in a minute and then the smiling man will pull the sword out of him. This is war and in war there is only room for hatred and cruelty. Watch the boy, Selvar—listen to him—"

The boy made whimpering, sobbing sounds as he writhed and tugged at the sword. The smiling man watched him until he was still, then he jerked the crimson blade free.

The battle was over by then. The last defender had been killed and the victors were already beginning the plundering on the village.

"Listen to them, Selvar—hear them laugh as they loot and destroy. They are rejoicing, as I told you they would. And the others, lying in the street—has not peace come to them as I promised?

"Soon, now, it will be time to burn the village. Just as soon as it has been looted of everything they want ..."

The women and children were herded from the houses. Some of the women and boys tried to resists and were struck down. Most of the women went dazedly, each to wander among the still forms in the street until she found the one for which she searched and then knelt silently beside it ...

It was over and the attackers were gone, the village roaring in flames. The heat drove the women and children up the street and out onto the field beside what had once been their village.

"It is only early fall and nothing can grow until spring comes. Look at the faces of those who have children, Selvar. Look at that one, Selvar—the one with the baby in her arms. Why do the tears run down her cheeks and fall on the baby she holds so close to her? Is it because the baby is so young and she knows she will lose it so soon when hunger makes her breasts go dry? ..."

The flames roared higher from the burning houses and a pall of smoke spread over the village and around it, enclosing the women and children, shutting out the sight of the still figures in the street, filling the scene with darkness but for the fire's red light on the face of the woman who cried as she held her baby against her.

"Remember her, Selvar—you killed her baby. And the others—how few will be left when spring comes? How will they be living sixty days from now? Do you want to know, Selvar? Would you like to see what your own hand has wrought?"

The scene faded away and another one appeared. It was early winter and snow clouds were massing overhead. There was a stubble-field and the emaciated little figure of a teen-age girl was crawling across it. There was no sound but the moan of the wind and the scrabbling noises her thin fingers made as she searched under each stalk for a grain that might have fallen during harvest. Her knees had made marks in the soil where she had gone up and down the field four times.

She crawled on and on and her hands raked and searched the soil beneath another stalk, then another and another ... She carried a little cup with her and when she at last found a grain to drop into it, there were no more than twenty grains already there.

"She is young, Selvar—she is no more than fifteen. Once, she was very pretty. She is young and wants to live—see how desperately she is trying to live. But she is weak and tired and it is hard to crawl from stalk to stalk. She is weak and hungry and cold and weary but she cannot stop to rest. Listen to the wind ...

The wind moaned louder around her and she looked up at the stormy sky; her eyes large in her thin face and dark with the knowledge of what the future held for her.

"Tonight it will snow and she has only today to search for grain in the field. Where will she go tomorrow, when snow covers the ground? Listen to the wind, Selvar, and watch her—see the thing you have done to her."

The cold wind whipped harder at her tattered garments and she tried to crawl faster, the little cup in her hand, raking hopefully beneath each stalk as she went on and on down the empty, lonely field ...

The scene faded and was gone. The moaning of the wind died away and the room was dark and still but for the sound of Selvar's breathing. Grey turned on the lights and saw by his watch that Selvar would come out from under the M.I. hypnosis in one minute.

Selvar stirred when the minute was up and would have risen. Grey laid a restraining hand on his shoulder and said:

"Wait, Selvar—sit still. You are on the ship and no harm will come to you. Sit still and listen to me, then you can go home."

"I saw them!" Selvar stared ahead of him, where the sphere had been, making no more effort to rise. "The girl in the field—the woman with the baby—the boy that was killed—I was there and saw them!"

"You saw what will happen if you forbid your people to go south of the Barrier."

"The girl in the field—who was she?"

"Does it matter?"

"But she was cold and hungry, and it was going to snow ..."

"She could have been anyone—she could have been your own granddaughter."

Selvar twisted in his chair to look up at Grey. "What did you do to me? I heard your voice while I watched my people die, yet they were real!"

The truth would not reduce the emotional impact of what Selvar had seen nor ever make it seem less real.

"They were only shadow-pictures, Selvar. None of it has happened—yet. But it has happened before and it will happen again if you force your people to stay in this valley. Do you still want it to be like that?"

"I—I don't know." Selvar slumped in the chair and held his head in his hands. "The book of Monomus—but the boy dying with the sword through him—the woman crying as the village burned—the girl in the field—I can't forget them ..."

"None of it will ever happen if you let your people go south of the Barrier."

"I don't know—I don't know ..." The misery of violently conflicting emotions was on Selvar's face. "At first I was sure and knew you were something evil and would bring harm to Vala. Now, I don't know—I want to believe you, to believe the very thing that Monomus warned against."

"Read the Book of Monomus again, when you get home. Look for the true meaning behind his words and then you will know what you must do."

Before Selvar could answer there came the sound of the girl drawing in a deep breath. It was the deep, sighing breath that always preceded a quick recovery from the needle gun drug. Selvar turned in his chair and saw her for the first time.

"Ritha!" he exclaimed, and tried to rise.

"She is unharmed," Grey said, again restraining Selvar. "The blood you see on her is mine, not hers."

She opened her eyes and saw them. She was out of the chair an instant later, to run to her grandfather and stand close beside him.

"I thought—I thought he had killed you!" she said. She looked up at Grey with precariously trembling defiance. "What are you going to do to us?"

"It's all right, Ritha," Selvar said and put his arm around her. "He only wanted to show me some—things—here in his ship."

"But you were lying on the ground. Then he grabbed me and hit me across the mouth—"

She touched her fingers to her lower lip and he saw it was swollen where he had slapped the palm of his hand against her mouth. It gave her the expression of a pouting little girl.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't intend to hurt you, but you were going to scream and that would have brought people running before I could have the chance to talk to your grandfather."

She relaxed a little and he told them how they came to be on the ship. Selvar listened with abstraction, as though his thoughts were elsewhere and the method of kidnapping was of no importance.

"No one need to know of this, if you wish." He said to Selvar when he had finished.

Relief seemed to pass across Selvar's face. "No," he said. "Remember that, Ritha."

Grey escorted them to the top of the ramp. The storm clouds were breaking up and it was not as dark as before.

"Tomorrow, the four of us will meet here in the ship," he said to Selvar. "Remember what you have seen and make whatever decision seems right to you."

"I will," Selvar said as he and the girl descended the ramp.

Yes, Grey thought as he shut the outer lock behind them, You will remember what you saw and never, until the day you die, will you be able to forget it fully.

Selvar was already waiting outside when he opened the airlock the next morning. His greeting carried no suspicion or enmity. Grey invited him into the reception room and he came up the ramp with the weariness of an old man who had not slept the night before.

"I thought all night of what you showed me," Selvar said when they were seated. "I thought of what will come to us in this valley, of how different our lives would be south of the Barrier, and I read the Book again"—there was child-like wonder in Selvar's voice—"and there was no warning there! How could I ever so have misinterpreted what Monomus said?"

"There was no misinterpretation?" he answered. "The warning was very valid and needed, until now. New circumstances have changed it. Have you decided in favor of going south of the Barrier?"

"I promise you all the cooperation within my power if you can prove your medicine will protect the Vala from the paralysis moths."

"Tomorrow I'm going south of the Barrier to collect some moths so I can make a vaccine protection against their bite. Would you like to come along?"

"Of course. How long will it be, after you find the moths, until you have this vaccine ready?"

"Anywhere from three to ten days. There are a good many different tests and operations involved in finding just the right vaccine and making sure it is infallible."

"It will have to tested on someone, won't it, to make certain of it beyond any doubt?" Selvar asked.

"That's right."

"I shall be that person," Selvar said. "I decided to trust you and if I've wronged in so doing, it is only fitting I be the one to pay with my life for doubting the word of Monomus."

"No one will pay with his life. There is a preventative and a few days from now I will have found it."

Selvar started to answer, then stopped to listen to the sound of voices just outside the ship.

"Here come Torgeth and Talmok now," Selvar said. "I have already told Torgeth about my decision. He seemed to be relieved and happy about it."

He reported to Gault that night and told him of the change in Selvar.

"Very good," Gault said. "Have you met with any of the town people yet?"

"This afternoon I made my first public appearance in the town square—with Torgeth, Talmok and Selvar to give the proper certification, of course. The general reaction when I showed scenes taken south of the Barrier was very good, especially among the younger adults. I told them that if all the Vala cooperated, there could be a colony down there within three months. The main problem, naturally, will be to have enough ships built in time."

"That will call for some very fast ship building."

"I think it can be done. The ships will have to be rudimentary in construction—about half way between raft and ship—but they will be quick to build with the limited tools and equipment the Vala have."

"There must be a very careful selection of the first groups to go," Gault said. "The environment south of the Barrier, with its abundance of game, fish, and wild fruits and vegetables, might tempt some of them to live the easy life and let the future take care of itself. The proper kind of questionnaire will be prepared for you and you can give it to the would-be colonists under the pretext of determining present trade skills and aptitude for learning new ones. It will be ready in two days."

"I told them we would set up schools as soon as possible. These will include courses on many different technical subjects but I didn't say exactly what subjects nor to what degree."

"We'll use the C-31A category in general. It's well adapted to their culture. There will be a few omissions and a few additions. We'll have all of it outlined for you by the time you are ready."

A great many from town were on hand the next morning to watch the ship take off. Torgeth, Selvar and Talmok came aboard and the sub-chief, Gondo, was ordering everyone to withdraw from the area around the ship when the outer locks closed.

Grey and the three Valans took the elevator to the control room, an experience that surprised Torgeth and Selvar and intrigued Talmok. Since the control room had but one chair, the pilot's, the three Valans stood behind him, watching the viewscreen, as he lifted ship.

He halted the ship when he was at an elevation of twenty-five thousand feet, the white fangs of the Barrier beside them and the valley visible up its entire length.

"Our valley is narrow," Torgeth said. "From here it looks like a deep gash in the world. And the Barrier—I knew it was high, but I never before realized how high. No wonder no one has ever been able to climb it."

"When the Emigrant ship comes—the first one—the Barrier will have a tunnel bored through its base with atomic disintegrators. It will connect the valley with the land south of the Barrier, a tunnel twenty times as wide as one of your roads. Later, there will be machines hauling freight and passengers through it, making the trip in a fiftieth of a day that would require thirty days by boat."

He lifted the ship higher and set a southerly course. The Barrier slid past under them and the green land was suddenly spread out before them.

"There it is," he said. "There is the land I told you of, the land that can be yours."

They watched in the viewscreen, with the longing eyes of pauper children staring through the show window of a toy shop, and no one spoke until the Barrier was far behind them.

He dropped to five thousand feet and they passed over the ruins of the abandoned village. He went five miles farther on, to a bay that was like a tongue of sapphire reaching out into the emerald land, a crystal river emptying into it. A low range of mountains lay to the west, vermilion peaks jutting above the forested slopes, and a group of rolling hills lay behind a blue lake to the north.

"Under us, here, would be an ideal site for the first village," he said. "Just above where the river empties into the bay. There is game here, and fish in t he river and bay. Those red peaks to the west are iron ore. There is copper, lead, and zinc in those hills to the north. There are forests for lumber near here, and the land for cultivation is everywhere. The elevation here is so much lower than that of your valley, and the latitude so much farther south, that there would never be any snow here in the winter."

He dropped the ship down to the suggested village site and said, "We can all leave the ship without any danger. I have an insect-repellant spray here that I'll use on all of us and no kind of insect, including moths, will come around us."

They were eager to accept the opportunity and a few minutes later Valans set foot on the land south of the Barrier for the first time in almost two centuries. There was no formality about it, no ceremony made of it. The three Valans still seemed afraid to claim for their people the land their people needed so badly.

Gray carried the equipment he expected to need as they walked away from the ship—a heavy sheath knife for cutting some branches from the moth bushes and a transparent specimen box with a double row of compartments for caging the moths—and his route diverged from that of the others as he went toward what seemed to be one of the silvery moth bushes.

Selvar hurried to catch up with him and they walked together. They passed a tree where a rope-like vine had climbed, hanging heavy with clusters of purple fruit, and Selvar said:

Our history mentions that fruit. It is supposed to be very good to eat and the vines are so strong they can be used as rope."

They walked on, past other plants which Selvar identified as various wild fruits and vegetables mentioned in their history.

"To think," Selvar said, "that this country should have been here all the time while we starved in our valley because a mindless insect denied us the right to live here!"

"We used to have similar situations on Earth," Grey said. "There was the bubonic plague, carried by rats and fleas; the sleeping sickness carried by a fly; a fever carried by a tick and another fever carried by the mosquito, and so on. Drugs and vaccines were developed long ago to prevent and/or cure all these diseases."

They saw the silvery shine of a moth bush a short distance further on. A dozen pale green moth-like insects were fluttering around it and scores of cocoons weighted down the pulpy leaves.

"They're just beginning to emerge," he said to Selvar. "If we had come a few days sooner we wouldn't have seen a moth—nothing but the cocoons."

The moths, disliking the scent of the insect repellant, were difficult to capture but he managed to scoop six of them into the specimen box, each into its own compartment. He put sections of leaves, each with its attached cocoon, in the remaining compartments.

He observed that the moths were moths in outward appearance only. Among the non-moth characteristics was a long, mosquito-like blood-sucking bill.

"I guess that's all we need here," he said to Selvar. "In the near future we'll find some method of destroying those bushes."

"Do you think the moths would die out if those mothbushes all were destroyed?" Selvar asked.

"It looks that way. There are no cocoons except on that one kind of bush. We can get rid of them some way, even if we have to uproot them all."

They passed by the purple fruit vine and Selvar stopped, to try without success to break off one of the clusters.

"Take this," Grey said, and handed him the knife. He went on, leaving Selvar engaged in cutting the tough vines, and met Torgeth and Talmok returning to the ship. Both were carrying green, cabbage-like vegetables which their history referred to as very edible. Talmok was talking enthusiastically and Torgeth was smiling, the first time Grey had ever seen him smile.

They went into the ship as soon as Selvar returned with his burden of purple fruit. Grey flew low to the ground, in a zig-zag course, to check a theory. He had seen no silver bushes when he first explored that country, except near the coast. His investigation proved the theory to be true---there were no moth bushes more than twenty miles inland.

Again he saw no birds. He used the projector to show the Valans an enlarged three-dimensional view of the Rona larks.

"This is what on Earth is called a 'bird'," he said. "I haven't yet learned what the Vala call them."

Talmok and the others stared with curiosity.

"You won't learn what the Vala calls them," Talmok said. "So far as I know, there is no such creature on Hardeen nor anything remotely resembling it."

A small crowd began to gather as soon as the ship landed back at Thylon. Torgeth and the other two went out with the vegetables and fruits they had gathered and he went into the medical room, leaving the airlock open as a show of trust in the Vala.

A minute later he heard soft steps in the corridor outside. He looked back at the open door and saw that it was the girl, Ritha.

"Come on in," he said.

She did so, a little hesitantly. "I brought back the knife you lent my grandfather. He shoved it under his belt and forgot about it."

"Thank you," Grey said.

She reached for the knife, which was thrust under her sash, then stopped the movement to say in a voice that was a half-frightened blurt:

"I wanted to ask you something—that's really why I'm here—something about my grandfather."

"Tell me what it is."

"He trusts you so much he is going to let a moth bite him whenever you say you have a cure. But what if you are wrong—what if the cure doesn't work?"

"I'll know for sure and certain before I ever let a moth bite your grandfather, or anybody."

"I tried to kill you once," she said. "Now, I'm sorry, because I know you didn't intend to hurt us. I would like to trust you the way my grandfather does ... Do you promise me everything will be just like you say?"

"I promise," he said, looking down into her grave and questioning eyes.

"And I believe you," she said, with a sincerity that left no doubt.

"I'm glad you believe me—but why do you believe me now when you didn't before."

"Because I know when people are telling the truth—that is, with most people. When you were a stranger and I was afraid of you, I couldn't know. But I'm not afraid of you anymore and now I know."

"I'm glad that you're no longer afraid of me, too. I'm really a very mild and gentle person."

She smiled shyly, then looked with interest at the specimen box. "So those are the moths that can kill people?"

He nodded and she said, "What if they should escape?"

"They can't escape until someone opens those lids. And I won't do that except to put them into something else."

"And even if they should escape and bite someone, there wouldn't be any danger, would there? You could make the cure before anyone died."

She reached out, to touch her finger to the transparent top of one of the compartments. The moth inside tried to reach her finger, beating its wings against the cover as it scented her flesh through the ventilation screen.

She jerked her finger back and said, "It's vicious and wants to kill people, doesn't it?"

"It's hungry for blood and doesn't know or care that its bite kills."

"Would you care if I stayed a while and watched how you will make this cure for all of us?"

"You had better run along, child. Your grandfather will be wondering where you went."

"I'm not a child!" she said with the stiffness of offended dignity. "I'm almost nineteen."

"How close is 'almost'?"

"Only a little over a year."

"Then you're already a woman," he said very seriously. "But I have a lot of work to do and I'll probably be at it most of the night." It was a dismissal too pointed and he softened it by adding, "Later, in a few days, I'll have time to show you all through the ship if you like."

"I would—I really would!"

"Then that's another promise of mine you can believe."

She was gone when he saw that she had forgotten to leave the knife. Not that it mattered—he had no immediate need for it.

He went down the corridor into another room and there he washed off the insect repellant and changed into clean clothes. He was returning to the medical room when he heard footsteps inside it. A moment later he heard a sharp, frightened exclamation:

"Oh!"

He thought of the moths and ran the rest of the way into the room.

He was too late—the girl was standing beside the table, staring white-faced at her left arm where a pale green moth was clinging, fanning its wings as it sucked the blood from a vein. The knife was lying on the specimen box, where one of the covers was standing open.

She held her arm out to him, stammering. "It—I didn't mean to—"

He plucked the moth off her arm, holding it in such a manner it could not bite him, and dropped it back in its compartment. He snapped the cover closed and removed the knife from the box.

"How did it happen?" he asked.

She rubbed her arm, where the moth's bite had left a red spot. "I was almost home when I remembered the knife. I brought it back and you were gone so I laid it on the box there where you would be sure to see it. Then that little lid flew open and the moth came out so fast I couldn't get away from it."

She was watching him as though afraid he might scold her for what she had done.

"I didn't hurt the moth—I knew you wanted to keep all of them to find a cure."

"It wasn't your fault," he said. "I've used that specimen box so many times that some of the release buttons are touchy. The weight of the knife was enough to make the lid come open."

She rubbed her arm again. "It hurts and burns. How long will it be before you have the cure?"

It was the question that was in his own mind. According to Valan history, death came within three days at the most and sometimes as quickly as one day. And he had not even started the tests that might require as many as ten days ...

"Is something wrong?" There was the beginning of apprehension in her eyes. "Will I maybe—die?"

"No—of course not." He forced a smile. "Making the cure is the simplest thing in the world."

"My arm keeps hurting worse all the time. And that red spot is getting bigger—see?"

He went to a cabinet and brought back a small vial of milky liquid. He put a drop of the liquid on the red spot with the bottle's glass dropper and asked, "How does it feel now?"

"It suddenly feels cool and doesn't hurt at all anymore. Is that part of the cure?"

"Ah—yes. Put a drop of that liquid on the bite six times a day and there won't be any pain from it."

"Is that all for me, now?"

"You can go. It might be better to say nothing about this to anyone—it might cause your grandfather needless worry."

"I won't say anything until you tell me I can."

"I'll have some more medicine for you tomorrow. Don't fail to use what you have six times a day, though."

"I won't," she said. "And I'll be back at this time of the day tomorrow for the new medicine you will have for me."

She left and he looked at the protoplasm synthesizer and the moths still in their box ... the new medicine you will have for me ... Today, an anesthetic liquid, tomorrow, sugar-filled capsules, the next day—what?

He had intended to follow a methodical test-by-elimination procedure until the desired drug, antibiotic or vaccine was found, but now there would be no time. The girl could be dead within twenty-four hours. He would have to select only the most likely of all the possibilities for test and hope fervently that the one he needed was not among those he had rejected as unlikely.

He went to the protoplasm synthesizer and set the dials for the manufacture of a blob of simulated muscular tissue, then neural tissue, then brain tissue. When the three blobs were delivered into three different observation chambers, he put a moth in with each. All three moths attacked the blobs without hesitation.

One of the three types should be the type the virus attacked. It had better be because the synthesizer could not duplicate the multitudinous glandular tissues.

Shortly after midnight he knew with certainty that the virus attacked only the neural tissue. He began his experiments, dividing the neural tissue so he could run three different tests at the same time, and he also used the synthesizer to produce more neural samples so the number of simultaneous tests could be increased.

Morning came, and nothing he had tried had halted the advance of the infection. Noon came, and he heard someone entering the room behind him.

It was Ritha, looking pale and frightened.

"I—I didn't wait as long as I thought I would," she said. "The bite keeps swelling and a while ago it suddenly started changing color and I felt scared."

"Let's see it," he said.

She was wearing a long-sleeved garment—she had worn something sleeveless the day before—and she pulled up the sleeve.

The swelling had increased tremendously and the color had turned to blue-black. The change of color meant the first spinal pains would start within six hours and she would be dead within three hours after that ...

"I wore long sleeves so no one would see it and ask me what was wrong."

He went to the cabinet and brought back the capsules. "Take one of these as soon as you get home. And be sure to keep on using those drops."

She took the sugar-filled capsules, holding them carefully. "Will there be other medicine for me tomorrow or will this be all I'll need?"

"One more treatment," he said, and thought, If not the cure, at least an anodyne to relieve the pain when she dies ...

"Stay at your grandfather's house so I'll know where you are," he said. "I'll be there as soon as I can with the rest of the medicine. If your back should begin to hurt before I arrive there, tell your grandfather to come to the ship at once. Tell him to hurry."

"But if the pain starts in my back, that means it will keep hurting more and more and pretty soon I'll die, doesn't it?"

He looked down at her at her upturned, worried face. "I will never let you know any pain, Ritha. Go home, now, and everything will be all right."

She left, holding tightly to the capsules and he considered the situation that faced him. Ever antibiotic known to Earth at the time of departure was on the ship, as well as every vaccine, but there was no time for even a short-cut elimination procedure. It was noon, and by the time the sun went down, the girl would already be dying.

He thought of the diseases of the past that had been so often fatal and of the first vaccine of all, against smallpox. Actually it had not really been a smallpox vaccine. Jenner, in 1796, observed that milkmaids who had a mild disease known as cowpox were immune to the deadly smallpox. So his vaccination had been no more than deliberately to induce cowpox, against which the body developed an immunity that also prevailed against smallpox.

Such a method might succeed with the moth-paralysis. He needed a vaccine for some disease attacking the nerves of the spinal cord, a disease for which a potent vaccine had been developed.

And that disease might be ...

Poliomyelitis—infantile paralysis!

He immediately administered the polio vaccine to one of the infected tissue samples, wondering why he had not thought of it before, and then resumed the less hopeful experiments. He stopped often to see if the vaccine had affected the advance of the infection.

At the end of two hours it seemed to him the advance was slowing. At the end of another two hours it had almost halted. An hour after it had stopped completely and was beginning to recede.

He had found the cure unless something unforeseen developed, such as a reversal of the process when the primary, more concentrated, infection source was reached—

He heard quick footsteps, not Ritha's but Selvar's. He turned, and at the sight of the dark hopelessness on Selvar's face he knew what had happened.

Selvar spoke with difficulty, breathing hard from his hurrying.

"Ritha id dying. Will you go to her at once?"

"How long ago did she have the first symptoms?" he asked.

"I don't know, I came home and heard her struggling to breathe. She was doubled up in bed, in great pain, and she could barely speak. She told me she had been bitten by a moth and to go get you as quick as I could."

He hastily gathered the things he would need.

Selvar said anxiously, "She is in such pain—in only a little while, maybe even my now, she won't be able to breathe."

"I'll go on ahead—everything will be all right," he told Selvar and hurried to the airlock.

He saw it was afternoon again, the shadow of the ship just touching the bend in the road as it had done the last time he was outside. It gave him the queer feeling time stood still outside the ship while twenty-four worried, sleepless hours passed for him inside.

He ran all the way to Selvar's house, hoping he would not be too late. He heard Ritha's choking fight for breath when he reached the outer door. He ran on, into the inner room, and saw her lying on a couch, her back curved like a bow and her knees drawn up under her chin. Her face was flushed with fever, twisted with pain, and the tendons of her neck stood out like little ropes under the skin She recognized him and tried to speak.

"Lie still and don't try to talk," he said.

He ripped the material of her dress to bare her shoulder and injected the anodyne-soporific.

"All the hurting will be gone in a moment," he assured her.

The drugs worked quickly. She began to relax within seconds after he had spoken. The abnormal muscular tension left her and with the going of the pain she was able to breathe without the agonized effort. She tried to speak, very drowsily:

"It came so quickly I didn't have time to—to—"

Her voice died away and she lay still, her eyes closed and breathing quietly.

He injected the vaccine and straightened her on the bed so she lay in a normal position. Beyond that, all he could do for her would be to wait and hope ...

Selvar came in, to stop and turn almost white as he saw the motionless girl.

"No—she isn't' dead," Grey said to him. "The pain is gone and she is asleep. When she awakens, she will be well again."

"How long will that be?"

"Sometime after dark. I'll stay until everything is over."

"How did it happen?" Selvar asked. "No one ever told me about it."

He told Selvar and added, "I thought I would have time—I hoped I would have time, to be truthful—to find the cure before the first symptoms came. In the meantime, it would have helped no one for you to be worried."

Selvar brought chairs and they began the waiting. There was little conversation, the motionless girl occupying the minds of both of them. Grey made periodic trips to the couch to see if there was any change in her condition and each time he answered Selvar's silent, hopeful question with the words:

"She's still the same—it isn't time yet."

The sun lowered in the west, to throw its last rays across the room and touch the girl with its golden light. Her breathing had become so slow and shallow it was almost unobservable and Selvar went to her, to stand looking silently down at her. Grey had the feeling Selvar was praying to his god for the sun to shine on here when tomorrow came.

The light faded and dusk crept into the room. Grey, without asking, lit the oil lamp. He watched her by its flickering light as the time drew near when the effect of the anodyne-soporific would vanish.

At the end of the fifth hour from darkness she stirred. He went to her at once.

"She is awakening!" Selvar was beside him. "I was really afraid to believe you—I was afraid she was dying ..."

He held his hand just over her bare shoulder, ready to plunge the needle of the anodyne-soporific into it if the vaccine failed and she woke up screaming with pain.

She opened her eyes and very undramatically complained:

"I'm thirsty!"

He left some time after midnight, convinced Ritha's recovery was assured. All symptoms of the paralysis had vanished. The fever was gone and she was sleeping again, not the drugged sleep she had known before but a deep and natural sleep.

Selvar accompanied him to the door and said, "Twice I have doubted you. Each time I was wrong. I will not doubt again."

"And you'll do all you can to persuade the Vala to work together and have the ships built as soon as possible?"

"Anything and everything I can do."

The sun was well up when he went outside the ship the next morning. Selvar was sitting at the foot of the ramp, waiting for him.

"I didn't want to make you up," Selvar said, a consideration, Grey reflected, very much at variance with the regard Selvar held for him only a few days before.

"Come on inside," he invited, and they went to the reception room.

"Ritha is well," Selvar said, taking a chair. "She slept soundly all the rest of the night and she was hungry this morning."

"Of course," Grey agreed, as though he, himself, had never had any doubts. "Next, we should use your heliograph system to inform every village and town in the valley of Ritha's cure and to ask all the valley chiefs to assemble for a discussion of having a colony established south of the Barrier as soon as possible."

"Torgeth will have the messages sent. Would you use your ship to bring the chiefs from the distant towns and villages?"

"We'll pick them up as we go down the valley and we'll end up at Mezat. We don't have much time in which to build the ships—I would like the meeting to take place tomorrow."

"It can be arranged. Now that the paralysis cure is a fact, I can see no reason for anyone to be opposed to the plan. And there is something else to further convince the chiefs. I will let a moth bite me before all of them."

"You and I, Torgeth and Talmok—all four of us will do that."

Selvar stood up to go. "Do you want to see Ritha again?"

"Oh, yes. Tell her to come to the ship."

He was waiting at the airlock when she appeared a few minutes later. She smiled when she saw him, looking just a little pale but otherwise bearing no resemblance to the girl who had been dying the day before.

"Hello, Ritha," he said, unconsciously using the Terran greeting. "How do you feel this morning?"

"I feel fine—almost fine. Just a little weak." She walked up the ramp. "I'm afraid I didn't act very grateful last night, after you saved my life. All I did was demand a drink and go back to sleep."

"Which was the best thing for you. I want to make a blood test, then we'll know for sure you're cured."

"But I must be cured—if I wasn't, I would be dead, wouldn't I?"

"That sounds like a logical theory. But we'll make a blood test anyway. And let me see your arm."

The moth bite area was greatly reduced in size and no longer an abnormal color. The vaccine injection area was swollen only a little, as in a mild reaction to a smallpox vaccination.

"Everything looks good," he said. "By this time tomorrow, both those marks should be gone."

She followed him into the medical room. "You look tired. I've caused you to lose a lot of sleep, haven't I?"

"I am and you did," he agreed.

She looked at him quickly, to see if he was as humorlessly serious as he sounded.

"I didn't want to do it."

"It wasn't your fault and everything is all right, now. But there is one thing I would like you to do from now on.

"What is that?"

"Stay away from knives. Everytime you lay your hands on one, you cause us both trouble."

He wound the rubber tube around her upper arm and she watched with interest as the glass cylinder filled with her blood.

"If the disease isn't all gone, the machine will see some of these very tiny things you call vir'us?" she asked.

"Not exactly, but there will be a reaction I can see." He withdrew the needle and dabbed the puncture with alcohol-soaked cotton. "It won't take long to make the test."

"If I'm completely cured, then the moths couldn't hurt me and I could go south of the Barrier, couldn't I?"

He looked up from his work. "Would you really like to go?"

"I am going. I couldn't stand to stay here and everybody else getting ready to go. It makes me restless just to think about it."

"Don't you like it here in the valley?"

"I hate this valley. I've hated it ever since I was old enough to realize it was a prison for us. I want to go south of the Barrier where there are always things green and growing and living and not the cold and snow and wind moaning and screaming day and night, all through the long winter."

"I see no reason why you shouldn't go. It will be work, though, for everyone."

"I work hard here in this valley. We all do, so we can try to have enough food to last through the winter. And we work all through the winter, too. It's always the same—each year we do the same things out parents and their parents and their parents, on back for hundreds of years. South of the Barrier it would be different—there would be new things to do, and the work we did would be to accomplish something, not just to survive through one more winter."

"Do many others your age feel the same as you do?"

"Oh, lots of them—all of them, I guess. But there was no use, before, ever to say anything about it. We knew we had to stay."

"Not anymore," he said, turning away from the work he was doing. "The test result is negative—your cure is complete."

"I knew it would be," she said. "Only once was i afraid you couldn't save me. When Grandfather went for you, I was afraid I would die before you arrived. Then you came into the room and I knew everything would be all right."

He put his equipment away and said, "I'm going to see Torgeth now. Come back tomorrow and I'll check your arm for any secondary infections."

She walked with him down the ramp, then stopped at the foot of it.

"I have to go to my grandfather's house for the sewing I was doing for my aunt," she said. "I wanted to ask you before you go: what does 'Hello' mean?"

"It means about the same as 'good morning' or 'good evening'."

"It sounds nicer than our own word. And there is something else: what should we call you?"

"What do you call me now?"

"They call you 'The Stranger' but that isn't right. They should call you by your name, like you were their friend, because that's what you are."

"No name is Norman Grey. Talmok just calls me 'Grey'."

"Nor'mon Grey," she repeated. "That's two names. Does it make any difference which one we call you by?"

"Either one will do."

"Then I will call you Nor'mon. It sounds better than the other name—don't you think so?"

"I never gave the relative beauty of my tow names any thought," he said, "but I'll admit the inflection you give Nor'mon adds something to it our Terran pronunciation lacks."

He started on his way, thinking of the tasks ahead of him, and he was almost to the road before he realized she had said, "Good-by, Nor'mon."

He turned, to see her still standing where he had left her, a hurt expression on her face.

"Good-by Ritha," he said, and the hurt look vanished.

He gave Gault a full report that night. Gault was pleased with the final result of the near-tragedy.

"With the paralysis preventative now an accomplished fact," he said, "there shouldn't be any great obstacles ahead of you. Other than the time limitation your program will face."

"There may be trouble with a man named Truslin, according to Talmok. Truslin is a chief of Mezat, the largest town in the valley. Not a man nor a ship's timber can read the sea if Truslin so decrees. His cooperation is absolutely essential and it seems he is very apt to demand a price for it."

"What is the evidence of that?"

"Apparently he has strong personal-power ambitions. Leadership among the Vala is usually handed down from father to son—or to the eldest son-in-law if there is no son. Truslin thoughtfully married old chief Vorning's daughter—his only child—just before Vorning died. So he became chief of Mezat with no more effort than that. He has ruled Mezat with great joy and discipline ever since, according to Talmok."

"And you think he will want more than Mezat's share in the colonization project?"

"I hope not, but we'll see. I'll report as soon as I have something definite to report. It may be several days so don't think I died from the paralysis and withdraw my ship."

He lifted ship early the next morning, accompanied by Torgeth, Talmok, and Selvar. Everyone had agreed the day before, via heliograph communications, to meet in Mezat and he stopped at every town and village down the valley to pick up its chief with the exception of four of the farming villages whose chiefs could not attend the meeting for various reasons.

He had decided, to save time, to let the ship's reception room be the meeting place. He wanted, if it should be at all possible, to show the assembled chiefs the country south of the Barrier that same day and there would be no reason to waste time by going to and from the ship to some other meeting place.

He sat down at Mezat. Truslin did not appear—all the other chiefs had come to the ship as soon as it landed—and Selvar went to get him.

All the chiefs of the towns and larger villages were present: Torgeth of Thylon, aged, wrinkled Grath of Chimdel, tall, mustached Hanlar of Negya, and the green-eyed cat-like Welf od Dene, representing all the towns, with the exception of Mezat.

Truslin made his appearance, a huge man whose layer of fat—fat was unusual among the Vala—did not conceal the powerful muscles underneath. He stopped just inside the doorway, dismissed the assembled chiefs with one quick, imperious glance and then studied Grey with slow deliberation, from head to foot.

Torgeth spoke, to say, "Chief Truslin, this is Grey, the Earthman."

"So I assumed," Truslin said. He went to a chair and sat down, his movements the quick, impatient ones of a man whose time was valuable. He looked at Grey again. "I dropped some rather important work to come here. Shall we begin the discussion?"

"Very soon," Grey answered politely. "First, though, four of us are going to let moths bite us to prove our faith in the paralysis preventative."

He gave injections of the vaccine to himself, Torgeth, Talmok and Selvar. He then released a moth upon the arm of each of them.

Even Truslin was silent and staring as the moths filled themselves with blood. Grey and the other three killed the moths when the demonstration was over and Welf broke the silence that had lasted all the while:

"The Vala are going to live south of the Barrier for certain—or else we've just watched four men deliberately commit suicide."

"I assure all of you," Selvar said, "it was not suicide. I know—I saw my granddaughter dying and I saw how this medicine cured her within hours."

Grey spoke to the assembly:

"I suppose we all agree the major job will be to have enough ships built in time to take the first colonists south of the Barrier before the late-summer winds start. But before we make any specific plans regarding that, before we can have the fullest cooperation and effort in the job ahead, all doubt that men can live south of the Barrier must be removed. The demonstration four of us just made is not enough. To prove men can live south of the Barrier we are going to have to let men do exactly that."

Do you mean you want to leave a test group there first?" Grath asked.

"Yes. I would like for you chiefs to provide a total of fifteen volunteers by noon. The volunteers would take along shovels and axes with which to destroy the moth bushes. Fifteen men in ten days could destroy all the moth-bushes for a wide area around the site of the new village."

Old Hanlar tugged at his white mustache. "I, myself, am willing to believe the cure that worked for Selvar's granddaughter would work for all of us. Yet, it would not be wise to send hundreds of men, women and children south of the Barrier without first proving beyond all doubt that the cure is infallible. Your idea is good."

The others nodded in agreement, except Truslin, who drowned out something Grath was trying to say with his own words."

"I was going to insist upon such a test group myself. I couldn't have permitted Mezat to participate in the Colonization project without first seeing definite proof of its feasibility."

"Then if all agree," Grey said, "we'll take the volunteers south of the Barrier today."

"The volunteers are no problem," Truslin said. "I can give you as many men as you want, at once."

"I think," Torgeth said, "it would be better to have men from fifteen different towns and villages."

"Anyway—I don't care." Truslin shrugged. "Just so long as I learn whether or not the venture is sound."

Welf gave Truslin a look of intense dislike. In addition to the personal enmity between the two men, their villages had fought a bitter war only twenty years before. He started to speak to Truslin, then stopped with something like a flash of sudden amusement and anticipation in his green eyes. He turned to Grey and asked:

"We, as well as the volunteers, will be given the vaccine injections, won't we?"

"Yes," Grey answered. "I assume all of you will want to leave the ship for a while when it lands south of the Barrier."

There were nods of agreement, but for Truslin, and Hanlar said, "How long would any of us remain chief if he showed himself afraid to risk the danger he asked his volunteers to risk?"

Truslin still said nothing. The others watched him, waiting for his reaction. When none came, Welf asked very politely:

"Don't you agree, Chief Truslin?"

Truslin shifted in his seat, all the loudness gone from him.

"As I told you," he said, "I approve of this plan. But I have been thinking"—he wet his lips nervously—"and I have decided it would be impractical to try to send out the volunteers today. They must have time to equip themselves properly. We certainly don't want to leave them down there ill-prepared. In the meantime, while waiting to take them down there tomorrow, I suggest we discuss the other work."

"What other work?" Welf asked, his green eyes never leaving Truslin.

Truslin shifted in his chair again, glaring. "The ship building, of course! What else? We all agree it should be started at once. So the only intelligenet thing for us to do is to decide upon the most efficient methods while we are all here today, giving the volunteers time to equip themselves for the trip down tomorrow, rather than forcing them to hurry into the ship without half the things they will need."

"I see," Welf said. His lip curled in contempt, "and tomorrow you would be sick—or else have such important business to take care of that you couldn't go."

"Do you call me coward?" Truslin snarled. He jumped to his feet, his hand darting inside his blouse where he kept the sheathed knife so many of the Vala carried. "Do you insinuate, just because I want to organize the work into a sensible program, that I am afraid? Get up, Welf—get up, and let me spill your guts on the floor!"

Welf's green eyes were bright with battle lust and his answer was like the hiss of a cat as he came to his feet with his own knife in his hand.

"Try it, Truslin!"

"Hold it!" Grey leaned over the table, the needle gun in his hand. "What I have in my hand can drop both of you in your tracks. Sit down, both of you."

"He wants it," Welf said. "I'll give it to him!"

"No. Later—outside my ship—what you two do will be none of my business. But in here today we have assembled to plan something that will be of immense benefit to all the Vala. A war between Dene and Mezat, as the result of a killing, could wreck the entire plan. Both of you know that, don't you?"

Welf hesitated, the conflict between his anger and his sense of duty visible in his face. Then he said in a low, strained voice, "To my displeasure, you are right."

He put his knife away and sat down. Truslin remained standing, defiantly, his knife still in his hand.

"Sid down, Truslin," Grey said, and made a suggestive movement with the needle gun.

Truslin sat down, glowering. "Exchange that weapon you hold for a knife, alien, and we will be on equal terms."

Grey returned the needle gun to his pocket and Grath tried to ease the tension by saying, "We act like children by expecting Truslin to drop all his work just to go with us today. There is no reason why he shouldn't go on the next trip."

Truslin was sweating, torn between his hatred for Welf, his present indignity, his fear of the disease south of the Barrier, and his certainty of disgrace and loss of his position as chief of Mezat if he proved himself afraid to go south of the Barrier after grandiosely offering to send fifteen of his own people there.

He wiped the sweat from his forehead, then a peculiarly thoughtful expression washed across his face as he looked from Torgeth back to Grey.

"I'll go," he said. "I think we should give the volunteers more time, but the matter isn't important enough for me to make an issue of it."

Welf stared at Truslin as though baffled by the sudden change of attitude. The diplomatic Grath spoke before Welf could say something that might renew the feud:

"Then everything is settled. Such being the case, I suggest we immediately send the heliograph messages so the men and equipment will be waiting when this ship makes the rounds."

All the chiefs, with the exception of Truslin, left the ship, Talmok and Selvar with them. Truslin delayed his departure and spoke in a voice loud enough for the last of them going out through the airlock to hear him:

"I'll pick you the best man in Mezat. And I can give you as many more as you might need."

"Thank you," Grey said, "but just one for now will be enough."

Truslin glanced toward the empty doorway then went to the table where Grey sat. He leaned over and said in a low voice, "Do you still have any of that liquid that repels moths—the kind the four of you used when you went south of the Barrier?"

The reason for Truslin's abrupt change of mind was suddenly clear to Grey. He stepped around the table, letting his fingers slide over the recorder-projector switch as he did so, and stopped beside Truslin where the recorder's scanner would have both of them in view.

"Do I have what?" he asked.

"I said, do you have any of that liquid the four of you used to keep the moths from biting you?"

"Yes, but it won't be needed by anyone."

"I want some of it."

"Why?"

"Do you want the cooperation of Mezat?"

"Of course."

"Then give me some and don't waste anymore of my time."

"Neither I nor any of the others will use it."

"I don't care what you and the others use. Do I get the liquid or would you like to try building ships for a sea that you won't be permitted to go to?"

"Would you really forbid passage across Mezat territory just for that?"

Truslin's lips twisted in a mocking half-smile. "What do you think?"

"I'll get if for you," he said. "Wait here."

He returned with a small plastic bottle. "Press the top like this," he said. "Cover your hands and face and clothing with the spray. It's odorless and none of the others will ever know you used it."

Truslin put the bottle in his pocket, then said before he turned to go:

"I suggest you never let them find out either."

An hour later, with all chiefs on board as well as the Mezat volunteer, the ship started up the valley.

The volunteers were waiting, ranging in age from seventeen-year-old boys to middle-aged men, their meagre equipment and supplies beside them. Some of the younger ones swaggered a little as they passed through the spectators on their way into the ship but when Thylon was reached and the last volunteer was aboard, the airlock closed behind them all. Their familiar world cut off from them, the bravado gave way to a thoughtful silence.

Grey gave the last volunteer his shot, then he and chiefs went to the control room. He lifted the ship high above the valley and let them see how narrow it was and how really formidable was the great towering mass of the Barrier.

One section of the summit was hidden by clouds and he passed close to it so they could see the violence of the storm and the banners of wind-driven snow that whipped out from the crags. The audio pickups filled the control room with the roar and scream of the wind as the heavy ship trembled in the force of it.

Welf said, "Now I know what Torgeth meant when he said no man could ever cross that mountain on foot."

They came to the bay and he set the ship down near the river. They all left the ship, to stand in silence for a little while as the Valans looked at the green, promised land around them.

"This is worth risking death for," old Hanlar said at last. "There is more rich land to be seen even from where we stand here than there is in our entire valley."

"Which reminds me of the moths," one of the younger volunteers said, making his tone as casual as he could. "Let's go find some."

All of them followed Grey to the place where he had captured the moths. It was easily relocated by the swarm of pale green moths that came out to meet them.

One of the middle-aged volunteers instinctively slapped at the first moth to reach him, then dropped his hand to let the next one settle on his arm.

"We might as well find out now as later," he said to no one in particular.

All the others followed his example, including the chiefs, and when it was over everyone seemed to relax. The die was cast. Whatever the outcome might be, their fate was out of their hands.

Truslin had been careful to take up on unobtrusive position behind the group and no one noticed that the moths were avoiding him. He stepped forward, making an ostentatious effort to slap at a moth that was avoiding him by a good three feet, and said to Grey:

"Now we have all received out moth bites, I suggest we set these men to work. Do you have any definite plan as to what their duties shall be?"

"They will destroy moth-bushes," Grey answered patiently. "If my theory is correct the larva can feed only on moth-bush leaves. So destroying the bushes should eliminate future moths."

"I am already aware of that but there still must be some definite, methodical system followed for the most efficient results. Since you are uncertain regarding this, I suggest someone be placed in charge to supervise all activities. My own man will be quite satisfactory."

The volunteer from Dene looked quickly at Welf, whose refusal was apparent on his face as he started to speak. Grey interrupted him to say:

"We need someone from a neutral village." He looked at the graying volunteer from the village of Halrath, who had been the first to let a moth bite him. "Riln, there, if the majority agrees."

Riln looked surprised and said, "But I only volunteered to do what I could. I don't want to be in charge."

"I know." Grey smiled without humor. "That's why you're a good choice."

The agreement was unanimous, but for Truslin, and Riln shrugged and accepted the unwanted authority without further protest.

"Since my man will not be in charge," Truslin said, "I will not be responsible for any lack of progress that may result."

Grey felt the quick flush of anger almost overcoming his patience. With an effort he restrained himself to say only:

"I, myself, will take all responsibility. But with a man like Riln in charge, I'm not in the slightest worried."

An amused smile flashed across Welf's face and Truslin said with a thick undertone:

"Perhaps I should remind you, before you assume too much importance regarding Valan affairs, that you have been tolerated by us but not yet accepted by us—alien!"

They returned to the ship shortly afterward. There was little conversation among the Valan chiefs. Since only full cooperation between all towns and villages could release the Vala from their prison, the attitude of Truslin had created an unpleasant atmosphere. The volunteers gathered up their belongings and went to the place where they would make camp. The others spent the next hour looking over the village site and discussing the most desirable place along the shore of the bay for the ships to land.

Truslin disappeared shortly before departure time in the direction of the volunteer's camp. He came back with a look of satisfation on his face, to where Grey was standing alone by the ship.

"I decided not to let my man be under the orders of this Riln," he said. "I told him to set up a separate camp for himself."

Grey sighed wearily. "Do you have to maintain that attitude? We have big job ahead of us—can't we work together on it?"

"Exactly," Truslin agreed. "We should work together. Whenever you are ready to cooperate with me, I'll cooperate with you."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that the move of the Vala to this country is something too big for me to stand by and be contented with the role of a nonentity."

"What do you want?"

"You're going to have to have someone to oversee the timber-cutting operations, the transportation of the logs to the bay, the ship-building at the bay. There will have to be an over-all supervisor. I want that position. Later, you will need a top supervisor here. I want that position, too."

"I'm afraid the results would be unsatisfactory, for several reasons."

There was the sound of someone approaching and Truslin lowered his voice to say, "I will give you a few days to think it over. Either you suggest my name at the next assembly or I will withdraw the cooperation of Mezat."

Truslin's ultimatum required little thought during the next two days. He had considered going to Mezat and showing Truslin the answer he had for the threat, then changed his mind. He could deal with the matter when the time came, which would be at the next general assembly.

He consulted with Talmok regarding the best method of killing the moths on a large scale. Talmok had no suggestion. The chemicals known to the Vala were not numerous and insecticides were not known at all. He considered experimenting with the chemicals they did possess, then decided such a program might consume too much time, with success uncertain, while something in the way of a flame thrower would be both certain to kill and easily devised.

Petroleum was unknown to the Vala and the oil they used in their lamps was little more inflammable than the tallow of their candles, but there was a highland shrub that yielded a volatile, very inflammable, juice which they used for its medicinal properties. A small quantity of it added to the lamp oil produced a product that was satisfactory for the purpose.

He drew a sketch of the flame-thrower, a device somewhat along the lines of a blow torch but with a double bellows of leather to supply a constant air pressure. Torgeth sent the sketch to Negya, where there were craftsmen who could build such things, and made arrangements to have all the shrub juice the villages could spare sent to Negya. In addition, several groups of men were sent to the highlands to obtain more of it.

Grey translated the questionnaire the Board had prepared for him into Valan. On the morning of the day before the meeting was scheduled he asked Talmok to make the master-sheet copies for the duplicator, the only method by which a large amount of questionnaires could be turned out since the Valans had nothing resembling a printing press.

Talmok shook his head and said, "Age hasn't been as lenient to my fingers as it has with my mind. I could print them, but the job would be slow and not too legible."

"How about Selvar?" he asked.

"He went to Chimdel yesterday—it seems the Chimdel priest isn't fully convinced. You might get Ritha—she is well educate, by Valan standards, and turns out neat, fast work."

Ritha was summoned to the ship. She arrived flushed and near-breathless, immeasurably pleased by the prospect of printing out questionnaires what would be read by thousands of applicants.

She did so with such deft speed that she was out of a job by late afternoon, a development she had not anticipated and which she seemed to find depressing. He alleviated her dejection by telling her she could come back the next morning and help Talmok operate the duplicator.

That night he used the material he had on hand plus the M.I. drug to teach Talmok the Terran language. Talmok was silent for a while after it was over, then he said:

"There is so much I've learned, I still haven't had to time to comprehend it all. But I can see the Vala language is going to be inadequate for our new way of life.:

"Only in the technical sense. There will be a great many new words and expressions added to the Valan vocabulary, but the Valan language won't be replace. We don't want to replace it.

"Now, we're going to need a great many books. Select forty intelligent, literate men and I'll teach them Terran in the near future. Then they can translate various books I have into Valan, as well as a certain amount of other material they will take from the micro-film store."

He produced several sheets of paper and handed them to Talmok. "We'll have to have something a lot faster than hand-printing the books. I don't want to use the duplicator because I have only a limited supply of paper for it and I have to conserve it. Besides, even if I had an endless supply, you would still need printing presses after I leave here. So here are the diagrams for a simple yet efficient printing press that can be made in Negya. Later, we will need a second one to take south of the Barrier ..."

He went south of the Barrier early on the morning of the day scheduled for the meeting, Torgeth going with him. They found the men doing well. Truslin's man was camped with the others, obviously having decided to ignore Truslin's orders.

He gave Riln a supply of the quick-growing seeds which would mature in from five to thirty days, depending upon the crop produced.

"Plant them somewhere near the village site," he told Riln, "and harvest all the seeds when they are ready. That will make a seed supply large enough for you to replace mine and have plenty for the Vala."

He had the ship back in Thylon before the meeting was to begin. "The town hall had been provided with rows of benches and it was well filled with all the valley chiefs and most of the sub-chiefs, a large number of priests, and a scattering of minor officials.

Grey made his way to the table at the far end of the hall, carrying the recorder-projector, and saw that Truslin was already in position, seated directly in front of the table and half smiling with confident anticipation as he watched Grey's approach.

Grey set the projector on the table and faced his audience. "All of you know why we are here and how limited our time is. Torgeth and I just came back from the camp south of the Barrier. The work is progressing well there and the men are in perfect health. Now, several of you have seen that country but most of you haven't so I'll show you what it's like ..."

Again he was reminded of pauper children staring through the show window of a toy shop as he projected scene after scene of the rich, green land to the south. Torgeth took the floor the instant he shut off the projector, to say to the assembly:

"I can see a certain question on the faces of a great many of you: Is the country south of the Barrier really that big and green and fertile? The answer is 'Yes'. I know—I have been there three times."

There was a brief period in which the hall was noisy with many talking at once, then quiet as restored as Heshlin of Agath took the floor. He asked the question Grey knew would be in the minds of many of them:

It is hard to believe you would help us to such a land when you could so easily keep it for your own people. And what about these stories we have heard of your world soon to be destroyed and hundreds of thousands of your people—perhaps millions—stopping a little while here on their way to some other world?"

Grey operated the projector's buttons to bring the material he wanted into the proper sequence.

"Here are the answers to your questions," he said. "Here is the world I come from, Earth ..."

It was the second time within a few days he accompanied the projection with his lecture and he was grateful when it was over. It would not have to be repeated again; at least, not on Hardeen.

Bronvar, of the copper smelting village of Grupar, stood up to say:

"Your people have many wonderful machines to work for them. Will the Vala have such machines?"

"They will be told how to build them. A great many of the machines you will be building, yourselves, before very long. Others, such as the nuclear convertors and the machines they power, are some distance in the future."

The cautious Heshlin took the floor again.

"I am in favor of going south of the Barrier," he said. "Provided we can have absolute assurance your medicine will permanently protect us from the moths."

Hanlar took the floor. "As one of those who trusted the vaccine enough to let a moth bite him, I say this: The present indications are, the vaccine is absolute protection. Only time will tell for certain. We have no time to waste. So let's start the boat building at once. If none who were bitten show any symptoms by the time the boats are ready, that should be proof the vaccine is trustworthy."

There was almost unanimous agreement, followed by a short period of discussion, then Grey asked for a vote. The vote was unanimously in favor of starting the ship-building at once.

He breathed a sigh of relief and said to them:

"I'm glad to see this complete agreement. Now let's take a look at the role of each town and village. The contributions of some villages will be mainly manufactured articles, such as rope from Transvel, canvas for sails from Canalar, copper and bronze from Grupar, and so on. The farming villages probably can contribute quite a few men and buffalo until time for harvest.

"To estimate how many ships we can build in the short time we will have, we'll have to know approximately how many men and buffalo can be released from each town and village. Suppose each of you chiefs gives me his estimate ..."

An hour later it seemed that a practical goal, in view of their limited time, would be twenty-five ships. Each ship would be capable of carrying two hundred people plus their necessary possessions and a limited number of buffalo. If all went well, the ships would have time to return to the bay north of the Barrier and bring five thousand more Valans down before the late summer winds began.

Bronvar then asked the next question:

"How will the colonists be chosen? A lot more people are going to want to go than the ships can carry."

"That will be done on a percentage basis," Grey said. "If we can make the goal we just set for ourselves, each town and village will be eligible to send ten percent of its population. There will be an aptitude test, to show the skills or occupations of the applicants, so we can have the right proportion of farmers, carpenters, miners, and so on. Since there will be such a large number of perfectly suitable applicants, selection will have to be arbitrary to some extent. We can only try to be as impartial as possible."

"That is understandable," Welf said, standing up. "Since we all are agreed on everything, I suggest we get to work as soon as possible. Men can go out tomorrow and start cutting timbers for the ships while other groups do such work as improving that trail leading from Mezat down to the sea so the timbers can be dragged there."

Truslin rose to his feet, smiling lazily, sure of himself.

"One very important phase of this project has been overlooked," he said. "Competent supervision. It will be essential to have someone in charge of the entire project, someone of intelligence and experience who can be trusted to see the job is done in time." He looked at Grey. "I suggest you appoint such a person now."

"The chief of each town or village will supervise the work of his own men, or else appoint someone, himself, to do so," Grey said.

A little of the assurance left Truslin. "The work cannot proceed without coordination—you surely know that."

"I will do the coordinating."

"You would dictate, then?" Truslin charged. He turned to observe the reaction of the others. "You consider the Vala incompetent?"

"Coordination isn't dictation. No Valan could satisfactorily serve as a coordinator for the good reason that no Valan has adequate transportation. Travel by buffalo cart is so slow it would be impossible for a Valan to oversee the activities from the upper end of the valley down to the bay. I, with my ship, can do that."

"Which is no excuse," Truslin retorted. "You could use your ship to transport a Valan. I demand you appoint one us now as coordinator."

It was obvious, once again, it was useless to try reason with Truslin. "And if I don't?" Grey asked.

"If you insist upon ignoring Valan rights and dignity, I will have to withdraw Mezat."

"Withdraw Mezat?" Welf whirled on Truslin. "Are you serious? Would you withdraw Mezat for a reason so minor?"

"It is neither minor nor any concern of yours," Truslin replied.

"I thought everyone was in agreement," Torgeth said. "You, yourself, voted in favor of the project."

"I'm still whole-heartedly in favor of it," Truslin said. "I only insist a suitable Valan be coordinator. If nor, then not a single man or ship timber will be permitted to pass through Mezat territory and go to the sea."

Truslin turned to Grey again, his full confidence restored. "I assume you are now ready to grant my reasonable request?"

"I think you should consider the advantages of letting Mezat cooperate," Grey said. "In the meantime"—he faced the assembly—"I have here a scene I haven't shown you, the scene where Torgeth, Talmok, Selvar and I each let a moth bite into us."

Truslin scowled, puzzled. "What has that to do with my request?" he demanded.

Grey set the projector in operation without answering. When the scene was ended he said to the assembly, "That was the faith we have in the vaccine. Truslin was among those who watched what we did. He came to me shortly before departure time ..."

Truslin's eyes widened with sudden apprehension.

"Truslin stayed, after the other chiefs left the ship, to ask me a question ..."

The sphere came to life, to show Truslin standing before the table and Grey walking around to him.

"Do I have what?" the image of Grey asked.

The image of Truslin looked quickly toward the door, then back to Grey. "I said, do you have any of that liquid the rest of you used to keep the moths from biting you?"

"Yes, but it won't be needed by anyone," the image of Grey answered.

The scene froze at the last word of Grey's image and Grey looked at Truslin, his hand resting on the projector's controls. Truslin's face was flushed a savage red and there was an intense and impotent hatred in his eyes.

"I remember that," Truslin said loudly. "I then suggested the colonists be provided with the liquid as a double safeguard against the moths and you told me the vaccine alone would be good enough and neither the liquid nor my advice would be needed.

"But that's all something immaterial now. Let's get on with the business at hand—I have decided to let Mezat cooperate."

Grey switched off the projector and saw that three of the chiefs—Welf, Torgeth, Hanlar—were staring at Truslin with the contempt of men who did not need to see the rest of the scene to know what actually had happened.

Truslin, very much aware of the stares, flushed darker red and his hatred was still more intense as he looked from them back to Grey.

"I said, let's get on with the business at hand!" Truslin's tone was a snarl. "If you propose to set yourself up as coordinator, you are obligated to exhibit something more in the way of intelligence than a blank silence!"

Grey sighed again, that time not in relief. Truslin would neither forget, forgive, nor abandon his ambition. He would be a menace to the entire colonization project until he was permanently relegated to a position of harmless insignificance.

And men like Truslin usually became harmless and insignificant only after they were dead.

That night the village hall was partitioned off into rooms with cloth drapes, in readiness for the forthcoming "Aptitude Test." Grey intrusted Talmok, who would be in charge, in the procedure to be followed. Selvar, whose mission to Chimdel had been successful, was given the same instructions.

Later that evening Grey met Talmok's part-time understudy, Lokar, a quiet, thoughtful young man whose blazing red hair did not fit his personality. Lokar asked if he could help with the interviewing and Grey assured him he could. A broken leg that had failed to knit properly had given Lokar a permanent limp. That physical handicap, combined with his high degree of intelligence, would make him of more value interviewing than doing manual labor.

Torgeth spoke to Grey alone, as Grey was leaving to go to the ship:

"Why did you bring Truslin to his knees in public when you could have shown him the same threat privately and avoided the extreme hatred he now has for you?"

"I was going to do it that way, then I decided it would be better the other way."

"Why?"

"Truslin is a man who respects only force. I would rather have Truslin hate me—and respect me—for knocking him down, than to hold me in contempt for trying to appease him. He would have taken a private showing of that scene as a sign that I regarded him as important enough to merit such polite consideration—and the more polite consideration you show a man like him, the stronger his demands will become."

"Yes, that is true," Torgeth agreed. "But your trouble with him is only beginning. He will either have his way or he will end up trying to kill you. And he doesn't make any idle boasts when he claims to be the best man with a knife in the entire valley."

The first applicants were being interviewed shortly after sunrise the next morning, with Lokar handling the literate ones and Talmok and Selvar interviewing those who could not read.

After completing the tests, the applicants went to the ship for their anti-paralysis shots, bringing their test papers with them. They came both as a steady stream of individuals and as small groups, keeping Grey so busy giving them their shots that he had virtually no time left over in which to work at grading their papers.

At noon he sent word to Talmok he needed someone to help him, someone not already doing essential work.

The result of his request was the appearance of Ritha, so eager to help him he did not have the heart to send her back to the fields. She learned very quickly and was soon giving the shots with such deft speed she even found an occasional spare minute to help him at his own work.

He stacked the application forms in four groups as he checked them: Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor. Among the Poor were those who were mentally unfit, or were anti-cooperative, or who looked upon the migration as an opportunity to go to a paradise where there would be neither work nor responsibility.

The tests were not infallible and were not the equivalent of personal interrogation by trained men but they would serve the purpose well. There was a reason for every seeemingly random or innocuous question.

He revealed little of the results of the tests, even to Talmok, claiming final evaluation would have to take place later. Selvar did not take the test, explaining, "The land south of the Barrier is for the young and the ones who want to see and do new things. I want the Vala to have that land. I, however, will stay in the valley. All I ever had, my family, is buried here. I wouldn't want to leave them."

The scores of Torgeth, Talmok, and Lokar were all very high. Ritha, who had been the first in line when the tests began, would have had the highest score of all but for one minor fault. She was inclined to be too much of an idealistic dreamer.

Since it was necessary that all ships have crews willing to return to the bay, the male applicants were also asked: "Would you be willing to be a crewman on one of the ships for at least a round trip voyage and perhaps several voyages?" A high enough percentage answered "Yes" to make it appear certain there would be no scarcity of sailors.

On the third day the heliograph reported the need for another skilled worker at the tiny paper mill in Karen. Selvar, who had once worked there, left that evening for Karen.

A suitable replacement for him appeared the same evening, a muscular, genial and gray carpenter, a former priest from Negya. His name was Theen and he was a man both literate and wise despite the dust in his clothing and beard after the long walk from Negya. He was introduced to his job that night and the interviewing of the applicants resumed its routine the next morning.

Ritha stayed a little longer each evening to help Grey after her own duties were finished for the day, and he became increasingly aware of the fact she was a grown woman despite her not-quite-eighteen-years as she worked beside him. The warmth and vitality of her presence drove away the haunting memories of Leonora, from which he had never been completely free, and it seemed to him each night, after Ritha was gone, the ship was a little more lonely and empty than it had been the night before.

By noon of the sixth day the stream of applicants had dwindled to a trickle. All those within a reasonable walking distance of Thylon had come and gone.

By then his task of trying to coordinate the ship-building activities, the problems of which he knew of only be terse heliograph messages, was becoming increasingly difficult. He could no longer postpone his personal inspection.

He told Talmok of his plans, instructed Talmok and Lokar in the use of the hypodermic needle, and arrangements were made for Talmok, Lokar and Theen to set out the next morning by buffalo cart, with an ample supply of questionnaire forms, hypodermic needles and vaccine, and work their way down the valley to Mezat.

Ritha, who had become very quiet when she learned she would no longer be needed, remained to put the reception room back in order. Grey was conscious of her silently moving about her work as he went through the pile of application forms before him.

When late evening came he set the remainder of the forms to one side and looked up. Ritha was still working, even though the reception room was in perfect order, wiping a cloth up and down a metal surface that was already gleaming brightly.

"You can go if you want to, Ritha," he said.

She turned to face him. "Do you want me to go?"

"No—but you've worked hard all day and this room is cleaner than I ever saw it."

She put the cloth away, then came to the table where he sat. She seemed to be disturbed about something.

"Is something wrong?" he asked.

"No—nothing." She looked down at her sash and made an unnecessary adjustment of it.

There was a little silence and he said, "You've been a lot of help to me, Ritha. I couldn't have found anyone any better."

"But you don't need me anymore?"

"I have to leave in the morning, to make an inspection tour of all the work."

"How long will you be gone?"

"I don't know yet. I'll be back when Talmok and the others are finished with their work."

"Not before?"

"I suppose not. I'd have no reason to come back before then."

"I want to ask you—what you've told people—that you won't stay on Hardeen very long. Maybe only a year or two, they said."

"My job on Hardeen should be finished in six months at the most."

"Six months?" Her eyes widened. "Only six months?"

"Probably less than that."

"Only six months—why do you want to leave us so soon?"

"It's not what I want to do—it's what I have to do."

"But you wouldn't have to go," she said. "Hardeen can give a home to all the people behind you."

"No—there isn't enough land south of the Barrier for the Vala and my people, too. And that land belongs to the Vala. So I, and all the other Advance ship men, have to keep trying to find a world for our people where they won't be intruders."

"But you could stay for a lot longer than six months before you left."

"I have to go when they tell me to go."

"They?"

"The Advance Ship Board on Earth. If I don't go when they say, they will withdraw my ship."

"How can they do that?"

"There are controls for the ship, sealed off where they can't be touched, with which the Board can cut out my own controls and do what they want with the ship."

"Would it be so terrible if you had to stay here? Don't you like us?"

"I like the Vala, but there is another reason why I couldn't let them withdraw my ship."

"What reason?"

"It's something called the wanderlust—and other things."

"What is the 'wanderlust'?"

"It's a feeling, a restlessness that goes all through you like the blood in your veins. You can't stand the thought of staying—you have to go on."

"I want to leave this valley," she said. "When I think of how it would be if I had to stay here, it makes me feel so restless it hurts. Is that the way wanderlust is?"

"That's the way it is."

"But I only want to south of the Barrier, where there is sunlight and green things growing instead of dark and cold and snow. I don't want any more than that."

"You're lucky, Ritha. If you wanted any more than that you would never find it no matter how far you went."

"Then why do you keep hunting for something you will never find?"

"With me, it's more than the wanderlust. It's—other things, too."

"What other things?"

There was a ship that reached its invisible lash out across the long light-years of space, a whip the Board had begun to fashion the year he was ten—but there was no reason to tell her about it. She would not understand. Only those who had felt the cut of the whip could ever really understand it.

"Let's just say they are variations of the wanderlust."

She looked down at her sash again. "Couldn't there ever be—anything—on Hardeen you might want to stay for?"

"Not enough to let them withdraw my ship. Why do you ask, child?"

Her reaction was quite unexpected. "Yes—of course!" she said in a quick, small voice that seemed to tremble halfway between indignation and tears. "Next month I'll be eighteen, but to you I'm just a child!"

She turned and ran from the room.

"Ritha—" he called to her as she went out through the door, but she did not stop. She was already to the road when he reached the airlock, hurrying without looking back.

He returned to the reception room to find it more quite and empty than ever before. He tried to resume his work but he could not put the girl's question from his mind.

He was afraid he knew why she had asked.

It was early. It was dawn when he lifted the ship the next morning. He made a quick preliminary inspection of the work going on down the length of the valley, to give him the general picture, and that afternoon he set down at the camp beside the bay.

It was already a fair-sized camp, despite an insufficient supply of logs. Those not engaged in beginning the actual ship-building were at work with the trail crews, widening the steep trail leading down from Mezat so increasingly larger loads of logs could be brought. Within a few days, when a sufficient supply of logs could be delivered each day, the camp would be many times larger.

It was there one of the workmen asked him the question he had known would eventually be asked.

"Why are we doing all this work when you could make a few hundred trips with your ship and within a few weeks have all the Vala moved to south of the Barrier?"

The fundamental answer was the Vala would appreciate the southland more if they had to work for it than if it was handed to them on a silver platter. At the same time they would be more willing and eager to develop the land they had struggled to reach than if they acquired it without effort. But such an answer would be far more honest than tactful. Instead, he gave an explanation that was true—except regarding the ship-s fuel—and much more diplomatic.

"My ship doesn't have enough fuel to do that and still go on to the next world from here. Also, my ship wasn't built to carry loads of scared buffalo—and on top of that, you will have to have ships in the future, after I'm gone, for contact between those of you in the southland and those who will want to stay in the valley."

He spent the succeeding days on various missions up and down the valley. There was activity wherever he went. The little copper smelter at Grupar and the iron smelter at Agath glowed redly at night and smoke by day. The spinning wheels of Canalar whirred from dawn to dawn, making the strong thread that would be woven into ships' sails. The rope-makers of Trasvel robbed their store rooms of the sisal-like thet fiber to make the robes the ships would need. Blacksmith's anvils in every village rang throughout the day as the glowing bars of steel were hammered into ploughshares, axes, and other things, and trails lay like gray snakes down the sloping foot of the plateau where the timber crews were dragging the logs for loading on the ox carts that would take them to Mezat.

All work was proceeding with as little in the way of conflicting temperament as could be hoped for. The continued good health of the chiefs who had gone south of the Barrier seemed to have them all convinced the harder they worked, the sooner they could leave their prison valley.

There was the lack of coordination here and there that was no man's fault and he remedied such situations wherever he found them. With few exceptions, the Vala put in long hours of work, and with enthusiasm. This was true even of those who would not leave the valley. Even the oldest and most settled Valans wanted their children and grandchildren to have the opportunity of living where they could not be the hardships and hunger they had known so often.

The efforts needed to make the project a success increased as the skies remained cloudless and the specter of drought was seen in leaves already turning yellow. Although many of the fields were irrigated, many others were on high terraces where water could not be brought to them. Each day found the high fields more withered than the day before. Fear, that the crops there would never live to mature, became a dread certainty.

With this there came another certainty. If the ships were not built in time, the valley would know famine long before spring came.

He had delivered the flame-thrower, together with fuel, to Riln shortly after leaving Thylon and had promised to bring more flame-throwers and more men as soon as the men became available. On the thirtieth day the timber crews had done their job so well that a total of fifty men could be spared.

He picked up the men and their supplies and went to the village site south of the Barrier. Riln and his men were not there but from the air he could see they had planted the seed and had apparently harvested most of the seed crop. He went on, and located Riln's camp several miles to the northwest.

He landed there. The men he had brought with him walked out on the new land for the first time and he went to talk to Riln.

Riln reported excellent results with the flame-thrower. It killed all moths within seconds and also ignited the bushes.

"The seed crop is all harvested," Riln added, "but for a few of the slower-growing plants. They will be ready within two or three days."

"I brought fifty more men," he told Riln, "and three more flame-throwers. Put four small crews out with the flame-throwers and put everyone else to harvesting more crops. I know you're handicapped without buffalo for the plowing but plant everything it's practical to plant without plowed land.

"When you have that done, start cutting logs for the cabins. I'll keep bringing more men down to help as they become available and I think we can have a good many cabins already up by the time the colonists get here."

Riln's men—all of them single—wanted to remain south of the Barrier and he told them:

"I would like to take ten of you back with me. That will be undeniable proof to everyone in the valley that people can live here."

The men drew grass blades and the losers shrugged in resignation. After all, there would be compensation—they would be men of considerable importance and interest wherever they went.

The flame-throwers and fuel were brought from the ship. Riln selected four small crews from among the new arrivals and appointed his own four, more experienced, men as the ones to be in charge. Everyone who would go to the village site filed back into the ship and Grey and Riln followed behind.

Grey was at the foot of the ramp when he heard the sound that the conversation of the men around him had concealed before. He stopped, once again feeling the illusion of being in some fantastic time-twist.

The golden lark of Rona was singing.

He was it in a tree near Riln's camp. He pointed to it and asked, "Are there many of those around here?"

"The little flying animal? We have seen only the one," Riln answered. "It came to our camp several weeks ago and whenever we move camp, it goes with us."

Riln looked at the lark again. "It's a strange thing—a person would think it was lonesome."

He returned to the camp by the bay, which had for some time been the size of a town and was growing each day as more men were released from other work. The first two ships were completed the next morning and they were launched without ceremony.

The ships were crude in appearance, with a low second deck giving them a top-heavy look. On closer inspection they proved to be more soundly built than they appeared to be although they still were not very seaworthy by ancient Terran standards. However, they were the only type of craft with relatively large cargo space that could be built in sufficient numbers in the limited time available and they would serve the purpose well, barring the misfortune of an unseasonably early storm when they rounded the Barrier's horn.

He watched as the ships set an uncertain course for farther out in the bay and then maneuvered awkwardly as the captain and crew began the job of learning from experience so they could teach the captains and crews of all the ships yet to be built.

It was late afternoon when a message was brought to him from Mezat, the message he was impatiently anticipating.

Talmok and the others had finished their job and were ready for him to take them back to Thylon.

It was after sundown when he landed at Thylon. Talmok and the others immediately went home. He remained where he had accompanied them to the foot of the ramp, repelled by the thought of returning to the ship's steel-walled quietness.

Dusk settled down upon the valley and he heard the voices of a group of women and children coming down the road on their way back to town. They were walking slowly, as though tired, their voices a low murmur in which no words could be distinguished.

He wondered, with a feeling of loneliness, if Ritha would be among them and if she would come hurrying to the ship to meet him again. But they went on past the ship with no one turning aside.

The dusk deepened and lights began to appear in the houses. The night breeze stirred, bringing the freshness of the irrigated fields. Then it shifted, to come down from the high fields, and it was warm and dry, smelling of sun-scorched leaves.

Darkness was near when he saw Ritha coming. He went to meet her.

"Hello, Ritha."

"Hello, Nor'mon." She spoke casually, as though the incident when she ran from the ship never happened. "i was just coming back from work and I stopped to ask you how everything is going."

He did not ask her why she came back from work in such an unusual direction, nor did he comment upon the fact she was very neat and clean and combed and pretty for having just come in from the fields.

"Everything is going well," he said. "The first two ships were finished today and all the others should be finished within thirty days."

"They say the drought is just as bad all down the valley. If all the ships can be built in time to make the trips south of the Barrier before the storms begin, will enough people be gone so the ones left behind won't have to go hungry?"

"Enough will."

"We've been working hard to save all the fields we can, but so many of them are higher than any dam we can put in. The children"—there was a slight emphasis to the word—"have been a lot of help to us."

"I can see how hard you've been working," he said. "You're a lot thinner than when I left here. But in ten more days quite a few men and buffalo will be coming back and you won't have to work the way you have been. And in a few years from now, south of the Barrier, women won't have to work in the fields at all."

"Nor'mon—" She took hold of his arm, suddenly dropping all attempt to be cool and casual. "It isn't true, is it, what some of them told me—that only married women can go south of the Barrier? You promised me—"

"You will go. There was no rigid rule concerning single girls, anyway. Besides, there will be such a surplus of single men down there that you can have your choice of dozens to marry."

Her fingers tightened on his arm. "Do I have to marry somebody if I go?"

"Why?" he asked.

"Oh—because."

"That's no answer. Girls who are young and pretty seldom ever want to become old maids."

"Do you think I'm pretty?"

"Of course."

"But I'm only a child."

She failed to conceal the hurt in her voice and he said, "I'm sorry I called you a child. It isn't I don't realize you're a grown woman, it's just I'm old enough to be your father."

"My father?" The hurt in her voice was replaced by a tone of mischievous laughter. "Talmok said you're only thirteen years older than I am, so you would have to have been just a little over twelve when you—I mean, do you claim Earth boys can start in that young?"

He grinned and said, "I stand corrected."

"Talmok said Earthmen aren't old until they're at least eighty."

"That's true for most of them."

"Then we're almost the same age because when you're eighty I'll be almost seventy and seventy is old for a Valan."

There was a silence, in which she moved a little closer to him. "You were gone a long time, Nor'mon. Did you ever think of me sometimes?"

He answered her truthfully. "A lot of times."

"I—I was lonesome, Nor'mon. Will you feel that way when you have to leave? Does it seem still and quiet when you're alone on your ship?"

"It's as still as death."

"And lonely?"

"And lonely."

"Is it worth living centuries—the price you have to pay?"

"It's not as though I was immortal, Ritha. My life, to me, is just as short as the life of anyone else."

"I know—but here you are on Hardeen, alive, the same as I am, and an arrow could kill you the same as it could kill me. I am younger than you as we stand here tonight—but what if you should come back to this same spot five hundred years from now? You would still be the same as you are now but I would have been dead for over four hundred years and there would be no one who had ever heard of Ritha, the priest's granddaughter."

"An Advance pilot can never think of going back. It would be like having left a room where your friends lived, and then when you come back a little while later the room is full of strangers and they stare at you because they have never seen you before or over heard of your friends."

"Is this wanderlust so strong there can never be a friendship quite as strong as that?"

"It's more than just the wanderlust. It's also a wanting for something you might have had, but you didn't take it when you had the chance. It's a wanting for other things you almost had, and then they were taken away from you. It's a wanting for all the things you used to know and can never know again. The memories come to you more and more, after you've been on a world for awhile, and you can't let the Board take your ship away from you. You have to try to findall these things you've lost."

"But where, Nor'mon?"

"Somewhere farther on—somewhere beyond another sun."

"But the farther on you go, the more things you will have known and lost."

"Not if you're careful."

"What do you mean?"

"You can't lose what you never had—and you would be a fool to want to have something for a little while if you know it's something you can't keep."

There was a silence, then she said, "I don't understand, Nor'mon. I don't think I understand, because that would mean the reason you don't ..."

She did not finish the sentence and he said, "I don't want to take memories with me from Hardeen. Not the kind of memories I took from Earth."

Her face was a pale oval in the darkness as she looked up at him.

"But there is no one on Hardeen to give you memories like that. I know some little farm girl couldn't ever—couldn't ever—"

She faltered, trying to find the words for what she wanted to say, and someone laughed behind them, gusty and amused.

"A touching scene—do I intrude?"

Ritha whirled to face the speaker, drawing her breath in sharply with startled dismay. They turned more slowly, already having recognized the voice.

It was Truslin, the great bulk of him looming close in the darkness.

"You came very quietly, Truslin," he said.

"Perhaps you were too absorbed in your conversation to hear me."

Did you want to see me about something?"

"Privately."

"Go home, Ritha," he said.

Her hand touched his arm in a fleeting gesture of farewell, then she was gone.

"Come on into the ship," he said to Truslin.

Truslin laughed. "Do you think I'm a fool? We'll talk here, away from your spy machine."

"I can promise the recorder won't be in operation—but have it your way. What do you want?"

"I've been waiting for the past two days in the next village. The news came by heliograph this afternoon you were finally on your way to Thylon. There is something I want you to tell old Torgeth in my presence tonight—that's why I went to the trouble of meeting you here at Thylon."

"And what is that?"

"I understand the names of those who will go south of the Barrier will be given out within ten days. Torgeth has a great deal of influence with the other chiefs. To avoid time-wasting protests from the other chiefs, you will point out to Torgeth, very firmly and clearly, that I will go south of the Barrier when the ships sail, and that I will be in complete charge of all future activities down there."

"In charge? You haven't even taken the test!"

"To damnation with your test! I'm going south of the Barrier and you are placing me in charge."

"I am?"

"I think so. Within ten days, at the most, there will be an alternative you won't enjoy."

"I've tried to get along with you, Truslin, but I could never do anything like that."

"You refuse, then?"

"I do."

"Then consider this: you have ten days, or less, to live."

"Are you sure?"

"Without your magic cloak you are as vulnerable to an arrow as any Valan. And you won't dare wear it because that would make people wonder why you were afraid."

"If I should be stupid enough to let you kill me, what would you gain?"

"What I just now asked for. I would have it, or no on from the valley would cross Mezat territory to reach the ships in the bay. The ship building is far enough along, now, that I can survive without you if necessary."

"For the welfare of the Vala," Greg said to Truslin, "I wish you would change your plans. And for your own personal welfare, I suggest you don't try to assassinate me."

"I never change my plans, alien. You have ten days or less in which to change your own. I'll go now, and your little lethna can come panting back to you and take up where she had to leave off."

Lethna—it was the name of the female of a prolific species of rodent and was the supreme term of contempt for a woman. Lethna—and Ritha only wanted someone to love, someone who would stay and never leave her ...

"Wait, Truslin!" It was hard to make his voice even and controlled. "I've changed my mind."

Truslin stopped, to turn back. "You see the light of reason already, then?" he asked, his tone a purr of satisfaction.

"I've decided to see if you're as good with a knife as you claim to be. Wait until I get mine from the ship."

"So the affection isn't at all one-sided?" Truslin said, and laughed with gusto again.

"Will you be here when I return?"

"And fight in the dark, with no one to see us?"

"Why not? Are you afraid?"

"Not at all, alien. But if you insist on a duel with knives before an arrow kills you, I want the pleasure of dropping you before an interested audience, as you had an interested audience the day you used your spy machine."

Truslin turned and walked away, disappearing in the darkness. He considered stopping Truslin and forcing him to fight, then realized in the heat of his anger he had been unwise in wanting a duel. It would have been somewhat difficult to explain away Truslin's dead body to the complete satisfaction of all the Vala when morning came ...

"Nor'mon!"

Ritha was suddenly beside him.

"I thought I told you to go home," he said.

"I did—I almost did. Then I didn't." She drew a deep breath. "The name he called me—it's not true! He lied!"

"He only called you that because he hates me. Forget it, Ritha."

"I couldn't understand anything you said to him—you talked too low—and only part of what he said. What did he mean about killing you if you don't cooperate with him?"

"He won't kill anyone."

"Nor'mon—I've got to know!"

He gave her a brief account of Truslin's proposal and threat and said, "Don't tell anyone about it."

"Remember what I said tonight, Nor'mon, that an arrow could kill you the same as me. Don't make it come true—let him go south of the Barrier."

"Never, Ritha. That was the main purpose of the tests, to screen out men like Truslin."

"He will send out bowmen to sneak and hide, and one of them will kill you. What Truslin wants, he gets."

"Not this time. Now, don't worry about it and let's go on into town. I want to see Torgeth about some other things."

That night he replace the needle-gun, which was ineffective except at short range, with an old-fashioned automatic pistol. The pistol would be effective at long range and specific in its choice of target whereas a hand-blaster's dispersion made it unsuitable for use where his assassin-to-be might be one among a group of people.

There was no action from Truslin as the days went by, no indication he intended to carry out his threat.

On the fifth morning he gave out the names he had selected for the first five thousand and all that day the bright flashes of the heliographs played down the length of the valley, telling who would be the first to go south of the Barrier.

There was much excitement in Thylon among those who would go, excitement and a none-too-tactful display of elation before those who would have to wait for the second trip, or even until the next year. The losers consoled themselves with talk of how it would really not be so long before they, too, would sail for the southland.

On the seventh day he went to Negya to solve a technical problem that had come up in the construction of the printing press. Hanlar met him near the ship and they walked a while under the shade of a bell-flower tree before walking into the town.

When he returned there was an arrow buried deep in the trunk of the tree, at the exact spot where he had stood.

He said nothing to Ritha of Truslin's warning and left for the camp by the bay on the ninth morning. Ritha had known of his plans and she stopped by the ship on her way to the fields.

"I wish you wouldn't go, Nor'mon," she said.

"You'll be so close to Mezat where he can have you killed so easily. Isn't there anything to stop him?"

"I can't do anything until he makes the first move."

"If all the chiefs in the valley knew he threatened to kill you—"

"Telling them would be like asking for protection. Truslin would deny everything and half the people in the valley would think I was imagining things. Besides, I'm accustomed to fighting my own battles."

"I wish we were already south of the Barrier and all this was over."

"It will be before long. I'll be back this evening."

"Be careful, Nor'mon—whatever you do, be careful so you will come back."

Two more ships had been completed and were practicing tacking out in the bay. The other ships were nearing completion and there seemed no doubt that all ships would set sail in time to make a second trip.

There was little that needed his attention, a few minor problems concerning overlapping authority, a shortage of rope, a mild outbreak of indigestion among some of the men. He mediated the overlapping authority problem, made a quick run to Trasvel for the rope, and pointed out to the camp cooks that his sanitary recommendations had not been followed.

He left the bay that evening, with no hostile action from any of the Mezat men. The sun was down when he reached Thylon and women and children were coming home from work. Two were not far from the ship when he landed. One of them ran ahead of the other and he saw it was Ritha.

He looked toward the trees to the west as he descended the ramp. They were already thick with evening shadows and a perfect place of concealment for a Mezat bowman.

But he felt sure there was no immediate danger. Truslin would probably want him to have a least a second warning arrow before the fatal one came. There were many things he could do for Truslin south of the Barrier if only Truslin could threaten him into doing them.

One of the ship's tail fins barred his view of the road along which he had seen Ritha coming and he walked to the edge of it, an action that caused him to turn his back to the trees.

She was almost to the ship, breathing fast from her hurrying.

"Hello, Nor'mon. I was so worried while you were—"

Something tugged at his sleeve, quick and hard, Ritha jerked queerly and staggered a step backward.

Then she was falling, her face suddenly white and one hand clutching at something protruding from below her heart—the feathered shaft of an arrow.

She made one terrified little cry as she fell:

"Nor'mon—"

He knew in his mind they had killed her. His first reaction was a savage desire for vengeance. He swung around, the pistol in his hand, and dropped to one knee so the trees would be silhouetted against the sunset's afterglow. He saw what he expected, the shadow-shape of the assassin beginning his swift descent to the ground.

He shot four times, the pistol bucking and cracking in his hand, lashing out with its little tongues of flame in the dusk and shattering the quiet of the evening. The swift descent of the assassin faltered for moment, then he fell with a crackling of limbs. There was a soft thud as he struck the ground.

"Nor'mon—"

She was trying to sit up, her legs double under her and her arms spread wide to support her. He picked her up, cradling her as gently as possible and turning his head a little so he would not bump the shaft of the arrow.

"It hurts—" she said, then choked and coughed. He could feel the red spray on his face as she coughed and he hurried as swiftly as he could up the ramp and into the ship, filled with the hope she could not have to die and with the fear she would.

He set her o the table of the medical room, supporting her with one hand as he swung out the tray of instruments. She tried to brace herself with her hands on the table, without needing to be told to do so, and he released her to cut her blouse away. The sharp metal head of the arrow projected from her back and he clipped the shaft close to the flesh.

Blood was pouring from both openings of the wound and her arms trembled as she tried to keep them from giving way. She began to cough again and he eased her down to a reclining position on the table. She wiped at the blood on her mouth, to try to speak, and he said:

"Don't talk. It isn't bad—it won't be bad—in just a little while."

He looked toward the door, wishing someone would come to give him the help he needed, then began working with hands that seemed clumsy in their haste to prepare the things he would need. He pulled out the arrow and blood gushed from the wound. He injected fluid in the wound, an organic preparation that would expand as a foam and cling to the torn tissues, stopping the bleeding. Later, as the wound healed, the foam would be absorbed by the body. Her coughing lessened as he finished and he injected the drug that would counteract the shock to come later.

"Everything is going to be all right, Ritha," he told her. "All the danger is gone, now."

"Don't go outside, Nor'mon!" There was pleading anxiety on her face. "You're the one"—she coughed—"they want to kill. Don't go—"

He administered the anodyne-soporific as she spoke and her words faded away as it took effect. She relaxed, her eyes closing, and was still.

Someone was just entering the airlock as he reached it—Falna, the aunt with whom Ritha lived, looking about her uncertainly.

"Ritha—what happened to her? Falna asked.

"She was shot with an arrow—"

"Ritha—shot?" Alarm flashed across Falna's face. "I saw her fall and saw you carry her inside—where is she—how--?"

"She is out of danger, now. Go to her, in there where the light is," he said, and hurried out of the ship.

Talmok was coming and a boy was running toward them from the trees where the assassin lay.

Talmok called while still some distance away, "Is Ritha hurt?"

He told Talmok what had happened.

"I saw her fall," Talmok said as he stopped beside the ship. "Then you shot toward the trees with your weapon and the boy said he saw a man fall from the branches."

The boy came running up to them, almost too breathless to speak.

"It was Yolen, from Mezat," he panted, "and he was still alive on the ground."

"Did he say anything?" Talmok asked.

"He said, 'I didn't intend to hit the girl—she stepped around the ship as I shot'."

"Did he say anything else?"

"He said, 'It was Truslin's idea—I wish he was in my place now,' and then he died."

"I'm sorry, now, I killed him," Grey said. "But I thought he killed Ritha."

"Don't waste any sorrow on Yolen," Talmok said. "Anyone low enough to hire out as a murdered is no loss to the Vala. But what are you going to do now? About Truslin, I mean?"

"I'm going to Mezat in the morning. Right now, I want to take Ritha to her aunt's house." He looked toward the town. "There seems to be plenty of help on the way ..."

At Falna's hosue he instructed Falna and her two grown daughters in the care of Ritha and left them the medicines they would need. Ritha's convalescence would be a matter of weeks of rest and there was nothing more he could do for her during those weeks, unless an unforeseen emergency developed.

Talmok had gone to the heliograph tower—which used lanterns for transmitting messages at night—to notify Torgeth, who was away, of the incident. Theen walked part of the way back to the ship with Grey.

"It's a serious thing that Truslin has done." Theen said, disturbed. "His man invaded a peaceful town, at a time when the chief and all able-bodied men were away, and almost killed an innocent girl. Wars have started for much, much less."

Torgeth would be expected to go to Mezat as soon as he received word of the incident. There he would charge Truslin with the responsibility for the crime.

Truslin, in turn, would do one of two things. He would call Torgeth a liar and challenge him to a duel. Torgeth would be killed and war would be almost inevitable.

Or Truslin would deny all knowledge of the affair. Torgeth, wanting peace, would do the only thing short of outright hostilities that Valan custom and dignity permitted: he would warn Truslin to permit no citizen of Mezat ever to set foot on Thylon territory again.

In that case there would be no war immediately but the seeds would be sown, and the seeds would go with the ships to the new colony. Men from Thylon and Mezat, who had worked together and learned to like one another, would begin to look at one another distrustfully. Each would throw up a wall of reserve that would eventually grow into a cold barrier of suspicion and dislike.

"Everything was going so well," Theen said. "Now, this has happened. Must hatred be carried to the new colony?"

"I think tomorrow will bring a change for the better, Theen."

He was up at daylight the next morning but he had no appetite for breakfast. He wondered about Ritha, wanting to see her, but first wanting to perform his unpleasant duty as Truslin's executioner.

He lifted ship at sunrise and a little later he set it down at the edge of Mezat, near the house where Truslin lived.

He waited twenty minutes before Truslin finally appeared, flanked by his sub-chief and three other men. Truslin walked toward the ship with deliberate leisure and Grey took the elevator to the airlock. He met the slowly advancing Truslin and his men some distance from the ship.

"You paid me such an early call," Truslin said, picking his teeth, "that I had to finish breakfast first. Did you want to see me about anything?"

"Yes, there is something I thought you should know."

Satisfaction was in Truslin's thick-lipped smile. "I was quite sure you would decide to be cooperative. Come to my house—I'll give you the details of what I want there."

"This is good enough here. I wanted to tell you that Yolen bungled the job you sent him to do. He's dead."

Surprise and dismay flicked across Truslin's face.

"Yolen is dead?" Then in a change of tone, "What are you talking about?"

"You ought to know."

The others were looking from Grey to Truslin in perplexity.

"Yolen is dead?" the sub-chief asked. "What killed him?"

"I did. Truslin sent him to assassinate me and he hit Selvar's granddaughter instead. If it hadn't been for the medicines on my ship, she would have died within a few minutes."

"But Yolen—Truslin sent Yolen to kill you?" The sub-chief asked doubtfully. "Why should—"

Truslin's face was a dark and angry red. He spoke quickly to the others:

"Get on back into town, all of you, and tell Yolen's relatives that the alien has killed him."

"Stay here," Grey ordered, then said to Truslin, "The audience, Truslin—remember?"

Truslin stared at him for two long breaths and the red-faced anger was replaced with cold and calculating confidence.

"So you think you want it that way?" he asked.

"Don't you?"

"Only if you are a fool who can't see reason—which you now exhibit yourself to be. A fool is of no value to me and you will be no loss."

"Wait," Grey said as Truslin started to step forward. "Since only one of us will be able to give any explanations when this is over, suppose we tell these men what it's all about? Now, while they can hear both sides."

"It's a personal matter that concerns only the two of us," Truslin said. "I will explain everything to them—later."

Truslin stepped forward again, flicking the long knife from inside his blouse as he did so. Grey reached for his own knife—the one Ritha had dropped on the specimen box—and the four watching men stepped farther back.

Truslin was fast, despite his size, and very skilled. His first thrust ripped a slit in Grey's shirt. His second thrust went deep, and Grey felt the burn of the blade. He found the opening he wanted when Truslin made his third thrust, and it was very quickly over in the way he had been trained.

He parried the third thrust, then his parrying blade went on and up, just above Truslin's stomach, where there would be no rib bones but only soft, yielding flesh for the blade to pass through as it went on into the heart.

Truslin stiffened. His knife, still bright and clean but for the red stain on its tip, dropped from his hand. For an instant his eyes were wide with horrified surprise, the same horror Grey had seen in the eyes of others to whom death came quickly and unexpected. Then he fell. He lay still, one limp hand almost touching the knife he had dropped.

Grey spoke to the four watching men:

"Yolen is still lying where he died at the edge of Thylon, his bow and arrows beside him. The girl is in bed, badly wounded. Torgeth is on his way to Mezat and will officially give you"—he looked at the sub-chief—"the full story when he arrives here."

"Under such circumstances," the sub-chief said, "I can't very well condemn you for dueling with Truslin. I will wait to hear Torgeth's story."

On the way back to Thylon he saw a cart raising a little cloud of dust along the road. He dropped lower and recognized Torgeth.

Torgeth should find the situation remedied and should have no trouble maintaining peaceful relations between the two towns. The sub-chief had shown no desire to defend the dead Truslin's actions.

So all was well and he should look upon what he had done as only another necessary task he had successfully accomplished.

But he kept seeing the look of surprise and horror that had been in Truslin's eyes. It was the same look he had seen in Seaburn's eyes fourteen years before, when he emptied Seaburn's pistol into him and paved his own way into Neville Prison.

He sat the ship down at Thylon and went to meet Talmok, who was approaching the ship.

"Is it settled?" Talmok asked.

He told Talmok what had happened and Talmok said, "Again, I can feel no urge to weep. With him out of the way, there should be no more interference with the colonization plan."

"I don't think there will be."

"I also sent Selvar word about Ritha last night," Talmok said. "He will be in Thylon early tonight."

"How is Ritha doing?"

"She seems to be resting well. She wanted you to come see her as soon as you have time."

"I'm on my way there, now."

Ritha looked small and pale in the big bed but she smiled when she saw him.

"Hello, Nor'mon."

"How do you feel, Ritha?"

"I feel all right."

"You're a liar," he said, one hand on her forehead and the other on her wrist. But you haven't much fever and your pulse is almost normal. You really will feel all right in a few days?"

"How many?"

"Not many until you feel well, but quite a few before you can rise and move around."

"But I can't—" She would have sat up had he not held her down. "Nor'mon—I can't! The ships will leave me!"

"Be still—don't ever try to sit up like that again, not until you're better."

"But if I'm left behind—"

"You'll go later, in my ship. Won't that be just as good?"

"I would like that," she said, relaxing. "I would like that much better than going on the ships. When will it be?"

"As soon as you're well—and the quickest way to get well is to rest and do as you're told."

"I can't ever rest when you're away and I know Truslin will send somebody else to kill you."

"I went to Mezat this morning and talked to Truslin. He—he changed his mind."

"Are you sure—absolutely sure?"

"Absolutely sure. There's nothing anymore to worry about."

Selvar came to the ship that night. They talked a little while, then Selvar said:

"I realize Truslin couldn't have been permitted to continue. But did you have to kill him to stop him? There was a time when I, myself, hated and distrusted you. You showed me how wrong I was. Couldn't you have done the same with Truslin. Couldn't you have"—Selvar smiled faintly—"salvaged him?"

Grey smiled as faintly in return. "There was nothing about Truslin to salvage."

He reported to Gault that night and Gault was well satisfied with what he had done. It was characteristic of the Board that Gault expressed no regret over the killing of Truslin. An Advance pilot was to respect the rights and dignity of a race but individuals who would interfere with the welfare of that race, or with the Board's plans, were dispensable.

He was up early the next morning, as was his custom, and he went outside the ship.

The air was cool and sweet-scented with the freshness of green, growing things along the creek. In the east the sky was a golden glow, the brighter stars gleaming like diamonds. It reminded him of another morning, long ago, and he felt the nostalgia come back again.

There had been a little green valley, high up in the Rocky Mountains, and Leonora walking toward him with the dawn bright and golden in her hair. Leonora, laughing in the joy of youth and love ... Leonora, warm and precious beside him in the enchanted weeks to come ... Leonora, tears in her eyes when it was over, saying, "They can't make you leave me, Norman—they can't ..."

Well ... he learned how false had been her pretension of sorrow.

Or had he? Could he ever know? Had the Board been behind it all? At first, he had not suspected. Now, when it was too late, he was almost sure. Had she, like him, been subjected to manipulation by the Board, a puppet controlled by the invisible strings of emotion?

It did not matter. She was gone, for all the similarity between the dawn for before him and the one so long ago. Whether she had been heartless and lying, or tragically helpless, he would never know. She was gone, and those who had comprised the Board at the time were gone. Long years and decades had weathered and worried in their graves. And the little green valley where he had met her—if he could return to it he would find it changed beyond recognition by the years. He would look in vain for the familiar landmarks, for the little stone cabin with the green shingle roof where she had lived, for the four tall pines where he had first held her in his arms ...

He sighed, and tried to force the memories away, wondering if he would ever be free of their torment and knowing he would not. They would come stronger as the time drew near for him to leave Hardeen. The Board would see to that ...

In the days to come he made trip after trip to the village site south of the Barrier, taking men and supplies to add to the work force there. On the return trips he brought back fruits and vegetables from the steadily expanding fields of quick-growing crops.

The men of Thylon who would go south of the Barrier returned and Thylon, which had formerly been so quiet during the day, was filled with activity as the preparations of departure were made.

Then the day of departure came and with it the last farewells, some gay and carefree, some with joking laughter that could not quite conceal the sadness of parting, and some with unashamed tears. The carts began rolling out of Thylon and onto the road, each carrying the possessions that would be needed and that space on the ships would permit while all but the smallest children walked.

He went to see Ritha, who had looked forward to the excitement and adventure of going with them. He found her fretting and restless.

"Couldn't I see them go?" she asked. "I have to lie here in this gloomy room and hear the sounds of their going but I can't go, or even watch them."

He opened the door that gave a view of the edge of Thylon and the road down the valley and propped her up on pillows. He would have left her then, to continue with his own work, but she twisted around to look after him and say:

"Do you have to leave so soon?"

"I have to go on Negya today." He went back to her. "I told you not to twist around like that."

"I've been not moving around or anything, just like you said, but today I feel so restless. It's awfully lonesome in here, all by myself. Do you have to leave so soon, Nor'mon?"

"I'll stay a little while."

She was very obediently quiet and still as he sat beside her. The last cart was long since gone and the dust of it long since dissipated in the summer air before he finally left her.

The morning came when the ships would sail. Each ship had been given a definite quota, a quota naming the persons to go on it and specifying the number of buffalo as well as the amount and kind of possessions each man or family could take aboard. There was an area near each ship where the surplus possessions were piled, the various items to be returned later to their appropriate towns or villages. The piles of unnecessary possessions were small. The Vala Had never known luxuries.

The sky was clear and blue, with just enough breeze coming down from the west to let the ships make good headway. The last of the buffalo were herded onto the ships. The last colonists filed up the gangways, and the mooring ropes were cast loose. The gray-white sails were run up, to belly out as the wind filled them. One by one the ships moved out from the shore, gathering speed as they went and forming a determined—even if ragged—line as they went out across the bay and toward the Eastern Sea.

He watched them go, hoping the fair morning was a good open. If a hurricane should breed somewhere out in the ocean and strike the ships, he would be helpless to aid them.

It was something amusing and pathetic and admirable—twenty-five ships were setting out on a dangerous voyage, manned by crewmen who had never been to sea, commanded by captains who had never seen a ship.

The camp seemed suddenly quiet and deserted by contrast to the activity it had known so long, although more than a hundred men were still there to put everything in shape for the return of the ships and to take back to the valley the buffalo and equipment that remained.

He stayed until noon and the sails of the ships were long since gone below the horizon when he left.

He had arranged for the forty selected by Talmok to learn Terran to assemble in Helm and Karen; two villages so located that one or the other was fairly accessible from any point in the valley. It was possible to handle twenty in a group and he spent the rest of the day and part of the night in Helm giving the chosen twenty an adequate knowledge of Terran. He repeated the process the next day in Karen. To both groups he gave books which they should copy and then return to him before he left Hardeen.

It was evening when he returned to Thylon and a group of men, women and children were there to meet him and ask about the ships. The heliograph had reported all had gone well, a report he verified before going on to Talmok's house.

He told Talmok what he had accomplished and they discussed the forthcoming compilation of two Terran-Valan Valan-Terran dictionaries, one for the valley and one for the southland.

"The press came today," Talmok said. "The other is to be finished in a short while."

"There will be a lot of printing done before I leave Hardeen. You had better, just as soon as possible, train enough type setters and press operators so the presses can be going day and night."

Talmok nodded in agreement, then said, "There is something I was going to ask you. We have the maps you gave us of that land south of the Barrier but we still don't have a name for that country to put on the maps."

"Then name it, Talmok."

"Name it what? The Vala have never been permitted to explore and find new countries to name. How are names selected?"

"Sometimes a new land is named after the explorer. Sometimes the explorer names it after whatever suits his fancy."

"Then it should be named 'Greyland'."

"No—never that. Name it after a Valan."

"Who?"

He pondered briefly. "Let's name it after the first Valan to prove to the others that the Vala can live south of the Barrier—let's name it Rithaland."

"Then Rithaland it will be on the maps," Talmok said. "It's a good name. As you just said, an explorer often names a new land after whatever suits his fancy."

Grey looked quickly and sharply at the old man to see if a smile lurked in his beard.

"It's been a long time since I was young," Talmok said, "but I haven't lost my understanding of the young. You know, don't you, she would go to the end of the universe with you if you would let her?"

"She is only a girl of eighteen."

"A Valan girl at eighteen is a woman who knows exactly what she wants."

He made no reply and Talmok said, "We're going to need you for a long time. The books you leave won't be the same as personal assistance and advice. Do you think you could ever find a woman better than Ritha or a world better than Hardeen?"

"I can't stay. I told you that before, Talmok."

"Why not? Isn't it just a matter of wanting to stay and letting them go ahead and withdraw your ship?"

"There are—other factors."

"Other factors?"

"It would be hard to explain—it would take a long time. Now, about these printing presses ..."

It was Talmok's nature to be curious but he did not pursue the subject any further and the conversation resumed its former course.

Grey went from Talmok's house to Falna's house. He found Ritha lying dutifully in bed covered by a single thin blanket. A smile brightened her face at the sight of him.

"Hello, Nor'mon. You were gone a long time."

"How do you feel?"

"I feel almost good, but I grow so tired of having to lie here all the time."

"Later, you can sit up and later on you can move around a little."

"The news came by heliograph about the ships sailing."

"They're on their way. If all goes well, they'll be there within twenty days or less."

"What was it like when they left? What was it like when everyone was on board and our ships went sailing out of the bay? I've been trying to imagine it ..."

He told her and she listened, enraptured. "It must have been wonderful and exciting to have been on one of those ships," she said when he finished. "And it will be beautiful to see them come sailing into our new home. Will I be there, then?"

"No, that would be too soon."

"You never did tell me how long I'll have to stay here."

"Until you're well, then I'll take you south of the Barrier. And that country has a name, now, which Talmok is already putting on the maps. We named it after the first person ever to prove that the Vala could live there—we named it 'Rithaland'."

"Rithaland?" For a moment her face was radiant with delight, then it faded. "No, Nor'mon. It was wonderful and nice of you to name it that, but you mustn't do it."

"Why not?"

"I didn't do anything to help anybody. All I did was something stupid that caused a moth to bite me. You just named it that because I can't go there and you feel sorry for me."

"No—not because I felt sorry for you."

"What else? If you felt more than just sorry for me, you wouldn't want to leave Hardeen. I don't want that country named after me if you won't be there."

"I'll have to leave when the time comes. There is nothing I can do about it, Ritha."

"You never did tell me why. You said there are memories—memories of what? Of someone you knew on Earth, someone not like me but so beautiful you can't forget her?"

"Her?"

"I am only eighteen but I know that only a woman could ever make a man keep going on and on trying to find her again."

Leonora—How had the Valan girl guessed so closely? How had she known that Leonora would come back to him when it was time to go? I am only eighteen but I know ..."

"Was she very, very beautiful, Nor'mon? Not just pretty, like you said I was, but beautiful like a rainbow or a golden sunrise?"

"Maybe, someday, I'll try to tell you what the Board did to me and why I'll have to go when they order me to. But for now, Ritha try to understand whatever I do is because I don't want to take your memory with me—not the lonely memory it could be."

"Would it hurt so much for us to pretend for a little while you won't ever leave?"

"I'm afraid it would. So let's be good friends, and no more. Then, when it's time for me to leave, we can say, 'Good-by, Ritha,' and 'Good luck, Nor'mon,' and no one will feel bad about it. Wouldn't it be better that way?"

"Is that the way you want it?"

"No—but that's the way it will have to be."

"Then—" She turned her head to stare determination up at the ceiling. "Then I guess that's the way it will be, won't it?"

He stood up and said, "I have to go now, Ritha. I'll see you in a few days—see how you're coming along. You understand, don't you?"

"I—" Her lower lip quivered and there was the flash of white teeth as she bit into it. "I understand."

The bed rustled when he reached the door and he looked back. She had turned over on her stomach, quite against his orders, her face pillowed on her arms and her shoulders shaking. He did not scold her but softly closed the door behind him and went back to the lonely ship.

In the days that followed he concentrated on the work to be done and tried to put her from his mind. It was impossible to do so to any satisfactory degree but he held grimly to his resolution to keep trying.

The compilation of the dictionary-grammar and the translation of the books proceeded at a rapid rate. The printing press was set in day-and-night operation.

The weather remained clear but he checked twice on the progress of the ships. He went out again on the day they would round the Barrier's horn.

He found them farther on the way than he had estimated—experience was steadily improving their seamanship—and those visible on deck waved at his ship while the "flagship" ran up a signal that meant "All is well."

They would be in no danger until they began working their way through the reef-strewn area just south and west of the Barrier's horn, which they would not reach until morning of the next day.

He returned to Thylon that day and went to see Ritha early the next morning, the first time since he had left her crying.

She was sitting up in bed, sewing on what appeared to be one of her aunt's skirts. She laid the work aside when he entered.

"Hello, Nor'mon."

"Hello, Ritha."

There was an awkward little silence.

"You're looking good," he said. "Your aunt has been telling me you're getting better all the time."

"She said she saw you often and you always asked about my health. It was nice of you to bother to do that."

"Ritha—you know why I stayed away."

"I—" Then the aloofness vanished and she squeezed his hand in contrite apology. "I'm sorry, Nor'mon—I shouldn't have said that."

"I have to leave now. The ships will be at the reefs very shortly and I want to lead the way through."

"Then you will be back?'

"I'll go on down to the new camp for a while, first."

"The new camp—it doesn't even have a name, does it?"

"Nobody seems to have thought about that, yet. Give it a good name."

"Let's see ... that will be where our valley prison will be left behind and all of us will begin a new and better way of life. Let's call it Caralantha."

"Caralantha—City of the Dawn. It's a good name."

"Will it still be long before I can go there?"

"You're too important—it isn't time yet."

"But what if you have to go before you can take me there?

"It will be some time, yet, before they send me on."

"Did they ever tell you when it will be?"

"No. They never tell you in advance."

"If they should, don't tell me, Nor'mon. I wouldn't want to know. It would take all the sunshine out of those last days. Then, when the day comes, you can just say, 'I'm leaving now, Ritha,' and I'll say, 'Good luck, Nor'mon,' and it will be over very quick, like that."

"Just like that, Ritha. Like the way I'm telling you I have to leave now."

"Then"—she valiantly attempted a smile—"Good luck, Nor'mon."

"Good-by, Ritha. I'll see you again."

It was a good rehearsal of the final good-by, he thought as he left the house. There was only one thing wrong with it—he would not add "I'll see you again" to that final good-by.

The ships were approaching the first reefs. He dropped down close to the water, to go slowly ahead of them as instruments aboard the ship charted a safe course. The ships were clear of the last reef by noon, the open sea ahead of them, and the chart they would need for future voyages was on hand.

He blinked his landing lights in farewell and lifted higher, to go to Caralantha.

Everything was going well in Caralantha. Mooring posts had been set for the ship, scores of cabins were already completed, the moth-bushes had been destroyed for miles up and down the coast, and there was a large supply of fruits and vegetables already stocked away.

He stayed for three days, during which time he took Riln and six others to the various ore deposits, marked out roads from them to the river where the smelter would be built, and located a deposit of good quality coal at a point some distance up the river where it could be transported by boat to the smelter.

He left Caralantha early in the morning, to go out over the sea first and check on the ships. They were on course, sailing along steadily, and he turned toward the Barrier.

He set the ship down at Thylon and stepped out into the morning sunlight. Then he stood still, not breathing, to listen to a sound that trembled in the air.

A bell was ringing. It was the slow, sad toll of the passing bell and it came from the church just beyond Selvar's house.

Someone had died—Ritha!

He saw Lokar coming to meet him and he hurried to him.

"Lokar—who died?"

"Selvar."

Not Ritha—not Ritha—

"A hard whirlwind caught him when he was working on the heliograph tower," Lokar said. "He was knocked off and killed instantly. We are going to miss me—he was the hardest worker of all in the colonization project."

They walked together back into the edge of town and Lokar said, "He was Ritha's only relative."

"But she has an aunt—"

"Falna is just an aunt by a former marriage. Falna's daughters aren't related to Ritha, either."

"I didn't know that," he said, then asked, "Where is Talmok?"

"He's at the church, where Theen is acting as priest. The funeral services were ready to start and I was on my way when I saw your ship coming."

They came to the street that led to Falna's house and Grey said, "I'll go in and see her."

"You're not going to the funeral?" Lokar asked.

"I believe I had better not."

Lokar regarded him thoughtfully for a moment, "I think I can understand why."

There was no one in the front room of Falna's house and he went on to the doorway of Ritha's room.

She was propped up in bed, her head bowed down and her fingers twisting at the cover over her lap. The sound of the bell came loud and lonely through the open window and she did not hear him as he walked to her bedside.

"Ritha."

She turned quickly and reached out her arms to him.

"I was hoping you would come," she said, and began to cry.

"I'm sorry, Ritha," he said, and held her until the crying was finished.

"It doesn't seem right. I shouldn't be there to see him for the last time," she said. "But they wouldn't let me go."

"They did the right thing. You have no business trying to move around now."

"Are you going to go, Nor'mon?"

"To the service? No—I had better not."

"Why?"

"The immortality paradox again, Ritha. Today they will be reminded of how short and uncertain a man's time to live can be and they will be reminded of the fact all of them here today—and every person alive on Hardeen—will be dead and gone within a century. If I was there they would look at me and think, "But not him! Ten centuries from now he will be alive and only of middle age." It would be as though I was flaunting my immortality before them."

"But it isn't really immortality."

"Most of them would realize that, I suppose, but the fact still remains I will be alive centuries after all of them are dead. It's human nature for them to feel they're somehow being cheated of something."

"Yes ... I can understand that." She was silent a little while. Then she said, "I'm so glad you're here today. I now have no relatives and that makes me feel awfully alone. Aunt Falna has been wonderfully nice, but I know I'm a burden on her, lying here all the while she has to work."

"The day is coming when you'll be working, too. We're going to have schools in Rithaland—I think I'll let you be what Terrans used to call a 'school ma'am."

He saw Talmok that day and told him:

"The ships will reach Caralantha in a very few days. I want to have things lined up here in the valley before then. I'll take you and Lokar to Caralantha with me when I go."

Theen agreed to take Selvar's place, with the expressed hope they would find someone to replace him "before I become too old to be of any value in Rithaland."

The next day he took Gondo, Thylon's sub-chief, with him and went down the valley, stopping at every town and village to pick up its chief—or its sub-chief if its chief had already sailed as a colonist.

At Karen the assembly spent two days discussing the various projects that would be started in the valley.

One was the erection and staffing of the valley's first hospital—a hospital that would be a hospital in name only until its doctors, nurses and assistants had studied the books the valley's printing press was publishing. Another was the building of a tool and lathe-making shop. This would require such skilled craftsmen in metal as the valley possessed, a crude pilot lathe to turn out one capable of making a lathe and a drill press that could produce a still better lathe.

There would have to be some method of powering the lathe. A water wheel was the best solution, but there was a serious drawback. In the winter the little river would be frozen and reduced to a trickle under the ice. However, there was a hot spring near Jennesse, bitter with minterals, which was of sufficient volume to turn a water wheel and it was agreed to build the tool-making shop there.

Karen was selected as the site of the first hospital and, due to its paper mill, as the place for the valley's printing press. Later after the tool shop had produced the means of doing so, there would be a much larger and more complex printing press built.

The day came when it was time for him to leave. Bronvar came to him and expressed the thought that seemed to be typical of all the others:

"I don't suppose I'll ever see you again. I appreciate the things you have done for us and may all go well with you, no matter where or how far you go."

Welf, who would not return to Dena for several days said:

"I am sorry you won't stay on Hardeen. And I'm also sorry"—there was a quick, mirthless smile—"you didn't let me have the pleasure of taking care of Truslin."

Gondo accompanied him back to Thylon and they went to Talmok's house, where Grey gave the old man the word he had been impatiently waiting for:

"This is the day, Talmok. You and Lokar assemble your stuff—we're leaving as soon as you're ready."

He went on down the street to the house where Ritha lived. He found her sitting up in bed, doing some more sewing for her aunt. As always, her face brightened at the sight of him.

"Nor'mon!"

"Hello, Ritha." He drew up a chair to sit beside her. "I came to tell you we're leaving this afternoon."

"This afternoon—so soon?"

"Everything is done here I can do and the ships will soon be in Caralantha."

"How long until you come back for me?"

"When I think you're well again—maybe sixty days."

"Sixty days?" Disappointment clouded her face. "Must it be that long?"

"I might be here sooner but I can't promise it."

"The days will drag by terribly slow, Nor'mon. I want so much to leave here and go with you south of the Barrier. I think about it all through the day and dream about it at night."

"Don't worry, Ritha—you'll be going there."

"I feel so restless, and each day is worse than the one before."

"I know how it is."

"Yes, because when they want you to go, they'll make you feel the same way, won't they?

"The same way but a lot stronger than you could ever imagine."

"But my restlessness is for a green and beautiful land that I know is there and yours will be for something you know you can never find. I don't want you ever to leave, Nor'mon—how can they make you do it?"

He had never told anyone what the Board had done to him to make his life one wherein he walked forever through shifting sand with never anything stable to know, and happiness for him an elusive mirage that was always somewhere ahead.

"I'll tell you a little of it," he said. "I suppose it began the year I was seven and I ran away from home for the first time ..."

It was not that his mother and stepfather were not good to him. His stepfather was an important official in Continental Transport and was seldom at home. His mother, absorbed in the social activities her marriage had brought her, was kind to him whenever she had time to spare for him and only vaguely aware of his existence the rest of the time.

She was mildly concerned the first time he ran away from home and mildly concerned when he did the same thing the next year. She asked him, that time, why he had done so. He could not tell her—he did not really know. It was a desire to see what lay on the other side of the city, and beyond it, and it was another thing, so deep-seated he could not recognize it: the yearning of a lonely little boy for the love other children had in their homes, but was not for him in his own.

His mother and stepfather were killed in an accident the year he was nine and he was sent north to live with his grandparents on their farm. They accepted him dutifully and he liked it there, for awhile, with the prairie reaching off to the distant horizon and giving him a feeling of freedom such as he never had in the city.

But he kept wondering what lay beyond the horizon and one morning, when he went out to bring in the milk cows, he somehow just kept on going, across the pastures, past the gentle cows, through the fence and onto the road where he thumbed a ride.

He was picked up in Crescent City and brought back the same day. His grandparents were sternly disapproving and he promised not to do such a thing again. It was a promise he kept until spring came, and a day when the little white clouds were sailing like fairy ships across the blue sky and beyond the horizon. He had to follow them.

He went as far as Lakeside that time, before he was stopped, and there they took him to the Juvenile Center. They were very nice to him in the Center, so pleasant and interested in him. He answered all their questions and told them about the three other times he had run away. Someone made a long-distance phone call to Star City about him and he was given a private room for the night.

The next morning a smiling, friendly man came to see him, a man who seemed to like little boys and who seemed to think it perfectly natural for a boy to want to know what lay beyond the horizon. After he had answered a great many questions he was asked if he would like to live in Star City, where the spaceship field was, and go to school there. He was very much excited by the prospect and he and the friendly man were on their way to Star City as soon as a phone call had been made to his grandparents.

He was taken to a place just outside Star City, where a group of white buildings sprawled out under shady trees and the sign on the gate of the steel fence read Crestwood School for Boys. He was turned over to a tanned young man in a T-shirt and the friendly man shook hands with him and said, "Good luck, Norman. You may go a long, long way—I think you will."

He never saw the friendly man again and it was to be years before he realize what he had meant and realize that he, as well as those who had questioned him at the Juvenile Center and his teachers at Crestwood, were part of the Advance Ship Board, the Board that was created the year development of the Davis Field made long interstellar journeys an attainable goal.

That night he watched a ship lift for the doomed mining colony on the moon. It was an old ship, built before discovery of the Gravinetic Drive, but as he listened to it roar up into the sky and watched its fire-trail arc out and away into the night, he knew what he wanted to do.

The horizons of Earth were boundaries too small for him. The stars of the galaxy's rim would be his horizon.

He was never to see his grandparents or their quiet farm again. His life became a kaleidoscope wherein the places and schools and friends he had come to know were constantly being changed. He was never permitted to stay more than a year in one place and sometimes it would be only a month. The constant change was what he wanted and he studied hard so there would be no low marks on his grades to cause them to send him back home as they did with so many of the other boys.

When he was seventeen they entered him in Space Training School. He killed Seaburn six months later.

Seaburn was the officer in charge and it seemed to Grey that Seaburn picked him out to be the butt of all his jokes and that Seaburn punished him to the limit for every minor fault he could find, or claim to find, in his conduct and in his ability to learn. He endured Seaburn's abuse and ridicule in silence, hating him more each day but hoping he would eventually change.

It ended the day Seaburn ordered Grey and all the others to assemble on the pretext he knew one of them to be a petty thief. He expressed his contempt for thieves in general and, again by implication, his contempt for Grey in particular. He then ordered Grey to step forward and in words too low for the others to hear he called Grey not only a thief but many other and far less honorable things.

The resentment Grey had held in check so long exploded into blind rage and he snatched Seaburn's pistol from his belt. The next moment he knew, he was watching Seaburn fall to the ground with surprise and horror in his eyes. Seaburn's pistol was hot and empty in his hand.

Years later he would realize Seaburn had not been the sadist he had pretended to be, that he had been acting under orders from the Advance Ship Board. The Board only planned for him, Grey, to strike his superior officer and receive the penalty of months in the guardhouse. But it served their purpose even better for him to kill Seaburn. They planned for him to know the deadly monotony and frustration of a six-month sentence in the guardhouse. Instead, he received a life sentence in Neville Prison.

Neville Prison set on a hillside at the edge of Star City. He could look through the barred window of his cell and see over the stone walls and past the guard towers to the far horizon that had so suddenly become forever beyond is reach. He could see the spaceship field and watch the ships lift up into the sky and by pressing his face close to the bars he could see the white buildings of Crestwood School where he had first started on the long training course that was to have given him a ship of his own.

The surging tide that was the life and movement of the world went on, but he was no longer a part of it. The blue dome of the sky hovered over the world and the horizon called to him through the long, long days but his own world had become a square little cell of steel: three steps, turn—three steps, turn ...

They gave him the mockery of a study course—the same course he would have been taking had he not killed Seaburn—and said to him:

"Your one single chance of every receiving a parole will be to make good grades. And don't ask why, because you are now a number and numbers don't ask questions."

He had been in Neville Prison for seven months, seven months of hopeless, helpless longing for freedom, when they let him escape.

As Raymond Johnson he knew two months of glorious freedom. He was in New Orleans, during Mardi Gras, when they came for him. He was sitting at a table, drinking alone and watching the swirl and turning of the dancers, listening to the music that throbbed and pulsed and filled the room with its gaiety.

Then there was a touch on his shoulder and he looked up to see two men standing close behind him, one on either side of him. He set his glass back down on the table, knowing before they spoke who they would be.

"All right, Grey, the vacation is over. They're waiting for you in Star City."

Winter had turned to spring and spring into early summer when he had his first visitor in Neville Prison. The man's name was Graham and he said he represented an unpublicized society that worked in cooperation with the Parole and Rehabilitation Board.

"Your case has attracted our attention," Graham said. "We have conferred with the Parole Board and there is a possibility your release can be arranged. That is, if you wish."

"If I wish?" He gripped hard on the chain that supported his cot. "Are you trying to be funny?"

"It won't be a pardon, you understand," Graham said, unperturbed. "Only a parole, at least for the time. You will have to go to a certain place to work, although your time will be your own to some extent after work hours."

"I don't care what kind of work it is or how long the hours are if I can only get out of here."

The days dragged by endlessly after Graham left and he alternated between a hope the Parole Board would approve Graham's request for his release and periods of depression when he was sure it had already been denied.

"Graham came for him on the eighth day—the parole had been granted. The door of his cell was swung open for him, and then the great steel gate was swung open for him, and then the great steel gate in the prison wall. Neville Prison was at last behind them as they drove in Graham's car down the road and into Star City.

"What kind of work will I do?" he asked.

"It's really a school," Graham answered. "It's what you might call an alternate Space Training school."

He stared at Graham, not replying. It was still hard to believe he was out of prison. The other was too much ...

The school was in an isolated section of country, thirty miles from Star City. It stood aloof from the nearby village, a cluster of gray barracks, their austere utility relieved only by a few trees and square little patches of green grass.

He was turned over to a man named Delacourt and Delacourt gave him an outline of the school's activities before taking him to a room in one of the barracks.

"No one will know you are on parole," Delacourt said. They walked into the room. "This will be yours for all the time you're here. If you become tired of it, there are no guards—here—to keep you from leaving whenever you wish. Naturally, if you should do so, we would have to inform the Parole Board and Neville Prison of your action."

Delacourt left then, with a pleasant smile, and he sat down on his bed to stare for a long time at a large painting on the opposite wall.

It was realistically done, entitled: Sunset at Star City. The spaceship field was in the foreground, with a ship just lifting. He could see the white building of Crestwood School in the left corner, and there were other buildings he had known once. But he had known none of them as well as the one looming gray and grim in the center of the painting and dominating all else—Neville Prison. He discovered, with a little start, the barred window staring at him more conspicuously than any of the others had been his own.

His life again became a kaleidoscope of ever-changing schools and a never-ending training that was both physical and mental.

When he was twenty he was given a full pardon. When he was twenty-two with several runs to Mars and Venus to his credit, they told him that he was among the few who were eligible for further training as Advance Ship pilots.

"Before you decide upon this," they told him, "remember the Board is interested in you only as a potential Advance Ship pilot. Should you fail in your training, the Board will have no further interest in you. You will become to the Board only an ordinary citizen. No attempt will be made to reinstate you as an interplanetary pilot. The Board is concerned only with saving as many as possible of the human race. Trainees who fail are of no value in this effort."

He accepted at once. He had seen the stars from interplanetary space. He had looked at the tumbled, blazing clouds of them and had fretted they should be so many lifetimes away, so forever beyond the microscopic reach of the interplanetary ships. How magnificent had been the great sweep of the stars of the galaxy, suns beyond numbers, new horizons beyond reckoning, waiting for him ...

He was taken before the Board Supervisor, himself—a gray-haired man whose attitude of impartial efficiency could not conceal the weariness the years of hard work and great responsibility had brought to him.

"You think you want adventure," the supervisor told him. "But the adventure of an Advance pilot will seldom be of the pleasant kind. There will be hard work, and loneliness such as you never knew before. There will be dangers such as you have never faced before. You will have been trained to the best of the Board's ability to cope with any situation, but once you leave Earth you will be strictly on your own. If you make a mistake, death will be the penalty. There will be no one on Earth who can help you."

The eyes of the supervisor were like cold gray ice as he continued:

"If you become an Advance pilot, you will never forget this: before Earth is destroyed, the Board will have entrusted the lives of three-quarters of a million men, women and children to you. Your job, no matter what the cost to you personally may be, will be to see to it these people live. If you should ever be tempted to place personal comfort or happiness above duty you will find the Board here on Earth, even though you may be light-centuries away, can force you to obey its will in a manner you will not enjoy."

"You speak of happiness," he said to the supervisor. "How much have I ever had? Can the Board do anything to me that would be worse than Neville Prison? Earth, itself, has become a prison to me. I want to go."

"Very well," the supervisor said. "You shall have your chance."

He was already to the door when the supervisor said, as though in idle afterthought:

"By the way, there will be a certain reward for each Advance pilot who does his job well and eventually finds a world on which all the people behind him can live. His life thenceforth shall be his own, to live as he pleases. And his ship shall be his own, to take him on the end of the galaxy if he so desires.

He completed the final training when he was twenty-five and passed the test with excellent grades. They told him his ship would be ready for flight in three months. During the waiting period, they told him, he must think over his desire to be an Advance pilot. He must decide with absolute certainty before he set out on the journey from which he could never return.

He had long ago decided, but he went to the little green valley in the Rockies where they had made reservations for him.

And there he met Leonora, with the sunlight golden in her hair and the laughter and teasing in her eyes. The days spun themselves into weeks and the weeks became a month. The laughter was still in Leonora's eyes, but not the teasing. Another month went by and the laughter was more and more replaced by a shadow when the talk turned to the day when he would leave.

"Will you care much when I leave, Leonora?" he asked her one day.

"I—it's something I try not to think about."

"Why?"

She looked up at him. "You don't know?"

He thought he knew and when he put his arm around her and she clung so tightly to him, he was sure of it.

The days that followed seemed to be no more than swiftly fleeing hours, the date of his departure rushing ever closer. They were days of happiness such as he had never known before, a happiness that was not the shallow one of the short furloughs with the clinking of glasses to accompany the laughter of the brassy women, but something full and deep that warmed and filled the emptiness within him. The thought of leaving lost its savor and each new day brought an increasing depression.

One of them came on the night of the eighty-fifth day, to tell him his time was up but for the following day.

The next morning he and Leonora climbed to the summit of Lookout Mountain, there to sit together under a granite crag with the green valley and the world spread out below them.

"In so very few days," she said, "we will never see this again. Not the two of us together, Norman."

"This day is the end, Leonora—they came and told me last night."

"Today?" her face clouded with distress. "Only today, and then I'll never see you again?"

"I have to report to them in Star City tomorrow, and I leave two days after that."

"But I thought there would be just a few more days ..." She tried to blink back tears. "Only today, and I'll never see you again—they can't make you leave me, Norman—they can't!"

"Do you want me to stay, Leonora?"

"If you leave, it will be the end of the world for me."

He made his decision then. All his life he had tried to find happiness as though it was a physical object that waited for him just over the hill, in the next town, just beyond the horizon, and he had only to go to it to have it. He had been wrong. Happiness was something that came to a person. It could not be hunted down. It had come to him in the form of Leonora and at last he had something precious and eternal, something that stilled the unrest he had always known and paled into insignificance the desire he had to take an Advance ship through the star clouds of the galaxy.

He told her he would go to Star City the next day and turn in his resignation. The shadow that had hovered over them so long seemed to vanish and they sat together above the sunlit world and made their plans for the future. It was the day that would be the golden culmination of the only real happiness he had ever known.

He left the next morning. Leonora held to him a long time and promised, "Only one day, Norman, and then I'll be in Star City with you."

He went to the Advance Ship Board in Star City and told them of his decision. No one asked him why he had decided to stay. They handed him a resignation form and he signed it, all with no more formality than if he had been drawing some travel pay.

There was a knock on his door early the next morning and Leonora walked into the room.

She was not smiling. She was suddenly a pale, aloof stranger.

"I came to tell you good-by," she said.

He halted his movement toward her. "Good-by?"

She remained standing just within the doorway. "I'm leaving this morning. You will never see me again."

Dimly, through the bewilderment that clouded and confused his mind, he heard himself say, "I don't understand. You told me—"

"All the promises I made you were lies. Forget me and forget all the promises I won't ever keep, but don't"—for a moment it seemed that tears were just below her cool composure—"don't hate me too much. Good-by, Norman."

She turned and left, shutting the door behind her. He heard her footsteps fade away down the corridor and he sat down in a chair, to try to bring himself realization and reorientation as the shattered fragments of his world fell around him.

He went to the Advance Ship Board the next day.

"What did you do with my resignation?" he asked.

"You have decided to go?"

"Yes, if it isn't too late."

"Your resignation is still in the desk drawer. We'll destroy it and you can leave in the morning."

He went back to his room, wondering if he could ever do anything that would surprise the Board.

He tried to forget Leonora but it was impossible. He made stops on various worlds. The worst period as the six months he spent on the near-Earth-type planet of Jungle, among the shuffling, ape-like cave-dwellers of that world. Jungle was thirty light-years away and Leonora would already have been married and growing old but that did not diminish his longing for her. He was glad when it was time to leave Jungle—they did not have to urge him on.

Rona had been different. Rona was Earth-type and the wise and gentle Thorlita almost succeeded in taking Leonora's place. The memory of Leonora no longer haunted him day and night. He would have stayed longer on Rona but when he told them of his decision, the lash of the ship came from Earth. Leonora came back to him, startlingly and poignantly real. She spoke to him and he relived the days in the little green valley. And she said other things to him, things that were not stored in his memory.

It's time to go, Norman. Somewhere you will find me. I'm waiting for you, somewhere further on. Go on, and find me, and I'll be yours for always ...

It was done by something in the ship, of course, some kind of transmitter so in mesh with his mind he saw and heard what it projected. He tried to resist, to let the presence of Thorlita drive the ghost of Leonora away. But the living Thorlita became something distant and shadowy as the days went by and the illusion that was Leonora became the warm and living flesh. He tried, but it was useless.

He lifted ship on the day they had set for him, and Leonora rode with him ...

Ritha sat small and still when he had finished. Then she spoke, to ask without looking at him:

"Was she very, very beautiful?"

He answered her honestly. "Yes, she was."

"But she is gone, Nor'on. You will never find her, and you will never find any of these other things you are looking for."

"I suppose I never will."

"The more worlds you find, the more memories you will have to make you keep going on and on."

"That's the way the Board planned it."

"There is something—I never did ask you before—"

"What is that, Ritha?"

"If you ever found someone you liked very much—why couldn't you take that person with you?"

"The Board thought of that. There are instruments, sealed off in the ship, that can detect the presence of an additional person. The Board would withdraw my ship if I tried to take someone with me."

"But why? What harm could it do?"

"An Advance pilot is of no value unless he keeps going on. If he had a woman, and then children later, the time might come when he would be content to settle down on some world and let them withdraw his ship."

"Then you can never possibly take anyone with you?"

"No."

"At first I only wanted to go south of the Barrier. But more and more now, as I look at the stars at night and think how soon you will be gone to them ..." As she looked at him there was the same hopeless longing in her eyes he once had seen in Leonora's. "Without you, the southland will be cold and empty for me. If only I could go with you, Nor'mon—"

He brushed the brown curls back from her face. "It can never be, Ritha, and there's no use for us to wish it could."

When it was time for him to leave, she said, "Won't I see you again, at all, until it's time for you to come for me?"

"No—I'll be busy all the time down there. And if it turns out to be more than sixty days before I come back, it will only mean that I was delayed a while longer."

She hugged him good-by and said, "Don't forget me Nor'mon—not entirely."

He left, wondering if she did not already know with her woman's intuition the reason he would stay away so long would be to try to forget her.

Talmok and Lokar were waiting at the ship, the printing press, books, and other supplies and equipment already having been loaded in the reception room.

He swung east, out over the sea, on the way to Caralantha. The ships were on course and no more than a day from their destination.

He went on to Caralantha, where the men were hard at work making everything ready for the coming of the ships. Talmok selected the largest of the completed buildings to be the one to contain both the printing press and to serve as the first school. Everything was moved from the ship into it and Talmok ordered construction commenced on a sufficient number of crude desks and chairs. More paper would arrive with the ships but not until another little paper mill was built at Caralantha would there be an adequate supply for both the gook printing and the additional schools that would be built. Grey solved that problem by taking a crew of men to the shale beds west of Caralantha for a slate supply and to the white cliffs south of Caralantha for a chalk supply.

The ships were standing out a mile from shore when daylight came and they immediately put on sail. The mooring took place with more earnest effort than efficiency but it was accomplished and the unloading of passengers and cargo began. There was a large element of excitement accompanying each ship, especially among the women and children. There was a renewing of friendship between those of different ships and an exchange of details of one another's experiences, including the experience they all had on the day a rolling sea spared not even the buffalo from mal de mer.

Torgeth found Grey, where he was standing a little apart from all the others, and said:

It's good to be here. This is something the Vala have not even dared dream about."

They talked a little while and Grey told him what had been accomplished in the valley.

"And Ritha?" Torgeth asked.

"She will be well in a couple of months. That will be too late for her to go on the second voyage so I'll go back and get her, myself." Then he added, as Torgeth looked at him in almost the same way Talmok once had, "I want to go back to the valley, anyway, before I leave."

Torgeth turned to observe the crowd of people along the beach and growing piles of possessions. "What about that?" he asked.

"The town site has been subdivided and posed with names and numbers. I arbitrarily assigned the passengers of each ship to a certain subdivision. Rila and his helpers will show everyone where to go. Later, they can trade lots if they wish, or more to whatever section of town they prefer. For today, this method should prevent delay and confusion."

The ships were unloaded and the buffalo had hauled most of the supplies to town by sundown. A celebration in honor of the occasion had already been planned. There was plenty in the way of fruits and vegetables on hand and a hasty foray by some bowmen had produced an almost sufficient supply of meat. Torgeth came to the ship late that evening with in invitation:

"We would like for you to join us in our modest celebration tonight. You are the one who made this colonization possible. We're not much at demonstrating our gratitude, but it exists. Will you come?"

H went intending to stay only long enough to be polite. But the accepted him as easily and naturally as though he had been born a Valan and it turned out to be a surprisingly pleasant and friendly evening. It was late when he returned to his ship and he knew, then, if he should ever let the Board withdraw his ship, the last vestige of Valan reserve would vanish and he would be one of them.

He reported to Gault and told him what had been accomplished. "There is nothing now that can seriously interfere with the plan," he added.

"Very good," Gault said. "When will the ships leave there?"

"They will sail at daylight in the morning. No time is being lost in trying to make that second voyage down here before the storms set in."

"You have made excellent progress, Grey. It won't be long until you can go on again."

"How long?"

"You will be given a definite date later."

"I'd like to know now."

"You will be told when the time comes."

He did not insist upon a definite answer, knowing it would be useless. They would not tell him until the time was almost at hand. And, whatever that time might be, it could not be far in the future.

Gault spoke again, in an odd tone:

"Gonzales' replacement landed the ship on the world where Gonzales disappeared. The ship's coordinate record file let him set down on the exact spot, of course. He learned what must have killed Gonzales."

"What?"

"Do you remember I told you of Gonzales' close escape from those beasts on Ursa that resembled grizzly bears? The bones of four of those creatures—or creatures similar to them—were found around the ship. There were also some human bones there—presumable those of Gonzales."

"So the new world has pseudo-grizzles, too?"

"According to the natives, it does not. Gonzales had landed in an isolated section to take the plant and soil specimens, one so far removed from the routes of the nomads none of them ever saw his ship. So there were no witnesses for the replacement pilot to question. But he reports the largest carnivores on that world to be an animal no larger than a small fox."

"Could these bears somehow have crawled inside Gonzales' ship and he took them with him, the way I must have taken the lark?"

"It seems impossible four monsters of that size could have been in the ship during the length of the voyage without Gonzales having known it. Also, nothing inside the ship was destroyed nor were there any faintest signs of animal occupancy.

"And there is something else: since the air of Ursa would have been fatal to a human within a few days, you can be sure the ship's Earth-type air would be equally deadly to the Ursa grizzlies."

"Then where did they come from?"

"That," Gault said, "is what we would like to know."

In the weeks that followed he forgot the mystery of the things that had killed Gonzales in his singular attempt to forget Ritha. He concentrated on the work at hand, hoping that would help keep his longing to see her again from destroying his resolve to remain away from her until almost time for him to go.

The colonists plowed and planted their fields and he took men with him to start the mining of the iron, coal, copper, lead and zinc. He used the ship's instruments to locate an exceptionally rich deposit of placer tin and started a mining operation there.

The construction of the smelter was commenced, as well as the building of a paper mill. He used the ship's instruments to detect the presence of a large petroleum reserve under some sandstone hills a hundred miles upriver from Caralantha. He marked the spot where they should drill the first well, a place where they would tap into the pool within less than three hundred feet.

By the end of forty days Caralantha was a town in fact as well as name. Almost all the houses for the second group of colonists were nearing completion and the checkerboard of fields surrounding the town had produced abundantly. Talmok organized another school, one for the teaching of medicine. Lokar, who had wanted from the beginning to study that subject, became the new school's student-teacher. Everyone worked, including the children who tended the vegetable patches and gathered wild fruit for drying. Fish abounded in the river—the river in the valley had never known a fish—and he showed them how to make and use nets so a few men could keep the town supplied with fresh fish. There were highly edible mollusks and giant crabs for the taking along the seashore and large schools of fish were often seen out in the bay. A tool and die shop was started, and a small chemical-production plant.

As the weeks went by the Barrier, eternally capped with snow announced the coming of winter by the steady descent of the snow line down its vast slopes.

The ships returned with the second group of colonists and moored for the winter in the bay. One of the ships carried a message for him, a forlorn note from Ritha:

Norman:

I am to lonely here. Why don't you come for me? We will have so little time together, at the most. I love you, Norman—please don't keep us parted for these last few weeks we can ever have together ...

The letter increased his longing for her and a week later he knew there was no use to try any longer—he could not forget her and did not want to.

He went to Talmok and told him he was going back to the valley.

"Will this be your last trip?" Talmok asked.

"My last trip, Talmok."

"There are a couple of books I want to send to Thylon, and a few other small items. When are you going?"

"Late this afternoon, I'll bring Ritha back with me. That little cabin I once asked to be set aside for her—is it still waiting?"

"It's been waiting since the day it was built."

The sun was down when he passed over the Barrier. The valley was white with snow. He set the ship down in its usual place and put on a coat before leaving the ship.

The air was bitingly cold and the snow creaked underfoot as he walked toward what had once been a dusty road. He had no more reached it when he saw her running to meet him, a red scarf streaming out behind her.

"Nor'mon—Nor'mon!"

Then she was hugging him, laughing and crying at the same time. "I was afraid I would never see you again—"

He tilted her face up to kiss her and she looked up at him with happiness and accusation mingled. "You knew I was well weeks and weeks ago and still you wouldn't come after me!"

"I'm here for you now. We'll leave as soon as you're ready."

"Oh—I'm ready! I was packed and ready two weeks after you left. I kept hoping you might come sooner than you promised. I packed and unpacked and repacked so many times I lost count."

They walked together along the road and she said:

"It was a long wait for me, Nor'mon. I was so terribly lonely, and each day that went by would be one day less for us to be together before you had to leave."

"I wanted to know for sure about something first—I'll tell you about it after we're on our way."

They met others who had seen the descent of his ship and who wanted to know about the new colony. He told them in as few words as was politely possible and they went on to the house where Ritha lived. He talked a minute with Falna, who told him that Theen was in Negya, then he went on to the house of Gondo, leaving Ritha in an excited bustle of preparation.

He and Gondo sipped the rikt beverage as he told Gondo of the progress being made at Caralantha and Gondo told him of the affairs of the valley. Everything was going as well as could be hoped for while winter, which was really only just beginning, gripped the valley. The school had full attendance, the tool shop was nearing completion of its first lathe, and the medical school-hospital had—miracle of miracles—successfully performed a surgical operation and saved the life of a woman who was dying of the disease the Vala called hestaven and the Terran books called appendicitis.

When it was time for him to leave, Gondo asked, "Are you going to any of the other towns?"

He shook his head, "There is little, or nothing, I can do now that the Vala won't have to learn or do, themselves."

"And you won't be back next spring?"

"I'll be gone long before spring." He stood up. "There are a few things in the ship's reception room that Talmok sent."

"I'll go with you," Gondo said, "and get them."

Ritha was waiting with her belongings: a medium-sized bundle that was her bedding, a small bundle that was her clothes, and a very small bundle that contained all her keepsakes and other personal possessions. Gondo took the larger bundle, Grey took the bundle of clothing—he could tuck it under one arm and Ritha took the keepsakes. She kissed her aunt good-by, solemnly told her cousins good-by, and the three of them went out into the cold night and onto the ship.

A few minutes later Gondo had wished him luck and started back home with the things sent by Talmok. Grey pressed the buttons that would withdraw the ramp and close the airlock, then he and Ritha took the elevator to the control room.

He lifted the ship for what would be its last time in the valley and gave the robo-pilot the desired course. The moon was up and he dimmed the control room lights so they could better see the viewscreen.

In the silver light of the moon it was a scene both magnificent and depressing. The awesome mass of the Barrier loomed before them, all gleaming white crags and inky defiles, while the highlands to the north and west were great rolling masses of shining hard steel. The valley below was a deep gash in the earth, etched in harsh contrasts of the cold white of snow and the dead black of shadow.

"How cruel and lifeless our valley looks, Ritha said, and shivered. "I'm glad I'm leaving it—I'm glad all of us who want can soon leave. It would be so wonderful tonight—I would be so happy if it wasn't so soon, now, you will be gone."

"I have decided to try to stay, Ritha. I'm going to tell them to withdraw my ship."

"Nor'mon! Oh, Nor'mon—" She hugged him, her face radiant with delight. "Oh, Nor'mon—if only you will try to stay, I could never ask for more!"

It was only natural, then, that the pilot's chair, designed for one, should suddenly by amply large for two. The ship swept on southward and the towering Barrier rushed toward them. The safety monitor flashed a red light on the control panel, then beeped with sharp indignation when nothing was done about it. The robo-pilot took over the controls, clucking admonishingly to the indignant monitor, and lifted the ship to pass high above the white peaks.

Ritha was moved into her cabin, which was situated on the slope above Caralantha and only a little way from his ship. He made reports to Gault at intervals but he never mentioned his decision to stay. There would be time enough for that when he work was finished.

The day came when his job on Hardeen was done. The Vala had been prepared, to the best of his ability, to continue on their own, preparations including, among other things, the means of producing their own paralysis-moth vaccine. All the books and equipment lent from the ship had been returned to it. The ship's convertors had been refueled, the water tanks filled, and the limited refrigerator space stocked with fresh meat, fish, fruit and vegetables. All was in readiness for the new pilot to carry on ...

He reported to Gault that night and said, "I've done everything I can do here."

"You have apparently done an excellent job, Grey."

"I have the ship ready to go. Tonight, if you wish. It's all yours—I'm going to stay."

There was a moment of silence but when Gault spoke, his tone carried either protest or threat.

"There will be the loss of years of advance for your ship if we have to withdraw it. Have you thought of that?"

"It won't do any harm, Gault. Hardeen can be a way station for all the groups that come by until the end."

"Thirty years in which we could be searching for a world of our own will be lost. That world must be found. And someday, somewhere, it will be found. Then all you Advance men can stop, and live your own lives."

"I've already stopped."

"You were trained for years for your work as an Advance pilot. None of the replacement pilots in the Emigrant ships have had training like that. I'm sorry, but you cannot remain on Hardeen."

"Do you think you can force me to leave?"

"We can. And, of course, we shall. A world is going to die. We of the Board do not like to do some of the things we have to do but it is our job to do them. We are, after all, human beings who have human sympathies for others."

"I don't want your sympathy. I only want you to withdraw my ship—now."

"You would let us do that—now? You are going to have to be given time in which to change your mind."

He moved out of the ship the next morning, into a vacant half-finished cabin nearby. It was a move consisting of not much more than walking out of the ship—his personal possessions were very few. He told Ritha what Gault had said and she, of all the Vala, knew why he never went into the ship during the days to come.

He spent the days assisting Talmok, Lokar, and the others. Ritha was given a school to teach, a score of small children who had yet to learn the alphabet. It was an experience that found her unprepared but stubbornly determined to succeed and within four days she had transformed a roomful of unruly young animals into twenty obedient and diligently studying children.

There was no action from the Board. He waited, knowing it would be coming, and the tension within him increased each day they let him wait.

Neither he nor Ritha mentioned what was uppermost in the minds of both of them until the evening she hold him of the shadow of the ship.

"It falls across my window each morning when the sun comes up," she said. "It makes me afraid."

"It is only a shadow, Ritha."

"But for it to be of your ship ... it's like a symbol, warning me that everything I want so much will never come true, after all."

"The ship that makes the shadow will be gone someday."

"That's why I'm so afraid, Nor'mon. What if you are in the ship when it leaves?"

Full darkness came as she sat close beside him and the stars came to brilliant life.

"Where would you go, Nor'mon?" she asked. "If they should make you leave me, which of all those stars will you be gone to?"

"That constellation just above the eastern horizon," he said. "The one that looks like an arrow."

"We call that the Hunter's Arrow. According to the old myth, the Hunter must wander forever across the sky until his arrow reaches that group of stars in front of it—and his arrow never gets any closer."

She leaned still closer and when she spoke again her voice was a lonely whisper in the night:

"Like your own search for happiness, Nor'mon—like yours ..."

The ship had been standing silent and deserted on the slope above Caralantha for six of the Hardeenian weeks, sinking deeper into the earth as the autumn showers softened the soil, when he felt the first warning flick of the whip.

He and Ritha had walked up the river that day. They came back by the bend where the river's current ran slow and lazy and the green glades were sweetly scented by the night-flowers that had reached up with their vines to twin around the trees.

"The night-flowers are like perfume," Ritha said, "even during the day when their blossoms are closed. Let's plant some night-flowers around our houses."

"Anything you want, Ritha."

"But we don't have a house—except mine. We could use that. What are we waiting for, Nor'mon?"

"For the ship to leave, so that we will know our lives are our own."

"But it may stay for months and months."

"No, they will withdraw it before long."

"How long, Nor'mon? How much longer must we have to wait and be afraid like this?"

"If they—"

He never finished the sentence. Leonora came to him at that moment, from across a century and a half of time and space. He heard the sound of her footsteps behind him, felt the soft touch of her hand on his arm, and heard her say to him:

It's getting late, Norman. It's almost time for you to go.

He turned toward the voice that was only in his mind, unable to halt the instinctive movement, and saw only the quiet, empty glade.

"Nor'mon!" Ritha was staring at him, frightened and questioning. "What is it?"

"I—I thought I heard something behind me."

"Was it—her?"

"It was nothing, Ritha—just some sound the wind made."

"There isn't any wind. They've started in to make you leave me, haven't they?"

He put his arm around her tense shoulders. "It was only a voice in my mind."

"Then it's come—what I've been so afraid would come."

"You are the one who is alive and real."

"But they will try and try to make you forget that." She looked up at him, her arm tight around him. "I'm afraid, Nor'mon—oh, so terribly afraid."

"Don't worry about it, Ritha. In only a few days the ship will leave and all our troubles will leave with it."

"If it leaves without you. But—"

They walked on, Ritha silent and thoughtful, then she said, "Would it help any if we pretended the ship wasn't there and made all our plans for the things we want to do? We have never dared plan ahead, before."

"Then let's dare to," he said.

"Can we build our house on that pretty slope above where my cabin is now? A nice house—I've thought about it a lot, Nor'mon, and when I shut my eyes I can see it, the size and shape of it, and where all the doors and windows will be ..."

The walked with their arms around each other, through the fragrant glades and along the green bank of the river and some of the hope she had lost came back to her as she talked of the things they would do when the ship was gone.

Leonora did not come to him that night, as he had expected. Instead, they waited until he was asleep and took him back to his boyhood ...

He was nine years old and it was spring. He stood on a hill above his grandfather's farm, watching the white clouds sail like fairy ships across the blue sea of the sky; on and on until they were gone beyond the horizon. The restlessness surged strong and compelling within him as he watched them.

What lay beyond that horizon? Would there be the things he had read about in books, the exciting and alluring things that the slow, dull part of the world he lived in didn't have? Would there be enchanted forests and gingerbread houses, fairy princesses in golden castles, fire-breathing dragons and armored knights with their lances glittering in the sun? People told him some of these things had not been for a long time, and some of them never, but how could they know? Maybe, if he went far enough beyond the horizon, he would find a country where all the interesting and exciting things people said couldn't happen were happening all the time, even as he stood on the hill and thought about it ...

He was eleven years old, and twelve, and thirteen—it was hard to remember just what his age was when there were so many things for him to do , so many new places to see and so many new things to learn. And, above all, there was the promise they had given him at Crestwood: "If you study hard you may have a ship of your own someday."

He was seventeen and in Space Training School. Out on the field was the ship on which he would receive his first training., the Terran Queen. She was old and scarred but his heart lifted with pride as he looked at her. She was his ship and to him she was beautiful ...

He was seventeen and a half and Seaburn was dead on the ground before him. The barrel of the pistol he held was hot to the touch and the others were staring at him, white-faced and mute.

The Terran Queen still waited out in the field but he knew he would never see her again, never see the stars ...

He was eighteen and a half and through the bars of his window he could see the white clouds sailing along the blue dome of the sky, on and on until they dipped below the distant horizon. The world was going its way, hurrying and living, but his own world until the day he died would be bound by four steel and concrete walls. Three steps, turn—three steps, turn—three steps, turn ...

The sun was touching his cabin when he awoke. He was tired, as though he had not slept at all. The four walls of his cabin seemed to enclose him, as his cell in Neville Prison had, and he hurried to dress and go outside.

He saw the shadow of his ship was falling across Ritha's window again. It helped, a little, to remind him of the present, of the ultimate penalty of letting the dreams become more real than reality.

But a restlessness had been stirred within him and there were white clouds sailing across the Hardeenian sky as there had been on Earth so long ago ...

Ritha went to her school that morning, reluctantly, and he made his routine rounds of the work that Talmok, Lokar and the others were doing. The hours dragged by with intolerable slowness and the thought of the waiting ship was a dark cloud that went with him throughout the day. His most determined efforts to concentrate on the work at hand failed miserably. He felt an apprehension, a sense of impending calamity.

The hands of his watch crept finally to the hour when Ritha would dismiss her class. The last of the children were racing toward home when he reached the school house and Ritha was closing the door behind her. She looked pale and tired.

"It was a long day, Nor'mon," she said. "I thought it would never end. I felt so worried—I couldn't remember from one minute to the next what I was supposed to do. Do I have to teach school again, tomorrow?"

"No," he said. They walked back toward her cabin. "It was a mistake for you to go today. We'll tell them you don't feel well. School will be closed for a few days."

"What about you?" she asked. "If you're away all day and I have to stay alone in my cabin and not know what will finally happen to us—"

"It was a long day for me, too, Ritha. I won't go back to work until the ship leaves."

Her face brightened. "Then we'll stay together until it leaves. I'll go wherever you go and maybe she won't come back again if I'm always here beside you"—she held his arm—"as I'm here beside you now."

Leonora was suddenly there as Ritha spoke, to take his other arm and say, Do you remember the little green valley, Norman?"

He saw her, as visible and real to his eyes as she had ever been in life, and in the golden radiance of her beauty, Ritha's prettiness was like a candle in the sun.

—the little green valley and our days together there. Go on, Norman, and you will find it all again. On, farther on—not here—

"Nor'mon!" Ritha's child-like wail of terror brought him back to reality. "Nor'mon—she has come again, hasn't she?"

"She—it's gone. It was nothing, Ritha."

"But she came, even as I was beginning to hope if I'm with you all the time she can't—you wouldn't let her—"

"You're the only one who is real."

"But when she comes, you forget. What can I do, Nor'mon—what can I ever do? It's going to end the way I've been so afraid it would end—"

"Everything is all right, Ritha," he said gently. "It was only a little incident, and now it's over. There will be other incidents, and they will be over, and then the ship will be gone. Let's go on to your cabin and think no more about it."

It was late when he left Ritha's cabin. He had tried to reassure her but she remained frightened and unconvinced. It was hard to make himself sound convincing while the ghost of Leonora called to him and the restlessness was flowing like an uneasy fire through his veins.

That night he relived the days with Leonora in the little valley. When it ended they were sitting under the crag on Lookout Mountain, the sunlit world at their feet and Leonora gloriously beautiful beside him. For awhile, after he awoke, he could still see her. Then she faded away and there was only the longing for her left, and the dark, still room enclosing him.

There was an imperceptible lightening of the sky to the east when he went outside. He walked slowly to the ship, wondering if his going was not an unconscious admission to himself the Board had already won.

In the control room the blue light of the hyperspace communicator was blinking. He wondered how long it had been doing that, imperiously demanding a reply from the empty chairs in the empty room.

He switched on his transmitter and said, "Gault?"

Gault answered at once:

"Hello, Grey. I've been waiting for you."

"When are you going to withdraw this ship?"

"Tomorrow morning. You'll know when—you'll hear the drive convertors start up. Exactly one minute after the sound goes into the ultrasonic, if you are not on the ship, it will leave. There will be no way in the universe you can ever call it back."

"I won't want to call it back. I only wanted to know when it would go, and ask you a question."

"What is the question?"

"Do you know what ever became of Leonora Jameson?"

"Do you remember she once told you the world would end for her if you left? It did, a year later."

"You lie, Gault. I would have stayed but she told me she had changed her mind."

"She had to tell you that."

"Then she was under the power of the Board all the time?"

"She wasn't under the power of the Board—she was a member of the Board."

It was a little while before Grey spoke.

"Is that the truth, Gault?"

"That's the truth."

"And she died only a year later?"

"It wasn't quite a year. She had done what she had to do and then there was nothing left for her to live for."

Again there was silence, then he said:

"I still think you lie—but how can I ever know for sure?"

He went back to his dark cabin, there to move about restlessly, unable to sit still. It was almost daylight when he decided on a course of action.

He could not forget Leonora nor keep away the haunting visions of her so long as he remained near the ship. Neither could he drive away the uneasy restlessness, the same restlessness he had felt when he paced his cell in Neville Prison. All of it was produced by something in the ship and if distance would weaken it for only the coming day and night, he would be free forever from it.

He did not awaken Ritha. It would only worry her the more if he told her why he had to be as far away from the ship as possible. He left her a note on the table in his cabin, where she would be certain to find it:

Ritha:

I'm going to the copper mine beyond Azure Lake today. I want to see how things are going there and I have to make an early start like this to be back by later tomorrow morning. Only until morning, Ritha, and I'll be back.

Norman

He was far up the river by midmorning, Caralantha long since hidden from view. But the restlessness went with him, unabated, and there were times when it seemed to him he was going back to Neville Prison, a guard walking on each side of him and the cold steel of handcuffs binding his wrists.

The feeling his captors were returning him to Neville Prison went away when he came to the place where he left the river. He rested awhile in the shade before he began the long, gentle climb toward the hills, beyond which would be Azure Lake and the copper mine.

It was very still and quite where he rested, as though he sat in some corner of the universe where there was nothing that moved or lived, some place where all life had gone away and would never return. The dead silence enclosed him, like some material substance, and the air seemed thick and hard to breathe.

He gave up the thought of resting and went on again. Another sensation came to him then. The gentle slope became an endless hill up which he struggled while his infinitely distant destination kept receding.

It seemed to him the summit was unreachably remote before him and that Caralantha was becoming unreachably far behind him. He had the feeling if he should ever reach the summit he would find nothing there but the dead and choking stillness, but if he hurried back to his ship he would find all the things he ever wanted.

It was mid-afternoon when he stopped to rest on the summit. There was the same stillness to the world he experienced beside the river; a stifling, oppressive hush. He had the impression he was the only living thing left in the world, that nowhere across the face of Hardeen did anything moved or breathed ...

This world is your prison, Norman.

Leonora was suddenly beside him, the reality of her presence diminished not at all by the distance to the ship.

Your lifeless prison, Norman, where you can never find me. Only your ship can ever release you—and in only a little while it will be gone forever ...

It was hard for him to remember the girl beside him, speaking to him in this hushed, motionless land, had not lived for a hundred and fifty years. And it was hard for him to remember why he had gone so far from his ship when it would be leaving so soon.

But he would have to remember, or all would be lost to him ...

He started down the trail to the lake and Leonora walked beside him. The uneasiness ran more and more urgently through him as they walked together.

Somewhere, beyond another sun, there was a world with white clouds sailing across a blue sky and somewhere on that world was a little green valley in which a girl with golden hair waited for him. But he was walking deeper and deeper into a lifeless prison which would never release him ...

He stopped wondering how far he had come. Was it already too late? Would he get back to find the ship gone and only the deep scars in the hillside to show where it had stood for so long?

Perhaps it was already too late. He would have to hurry—hurry—hurry—

He was breathing hard when he came again to the top of the summit. The hysteria left him at the sight of the distant river but the fear remained, the fear he would be left behind by his ship.

There was no use to try to go any farther from the ship. Distance did not diminish what they did to him.

And, flickering dimly, there was the hope the presence of Ritha might help him to know truly what it was he wanted to do.

The sun was down when he neared the river, the afterglow fading overhead.

There he found Ritha, trudging wearily and determinedly up the trail.

She ran the rest of the way when she saw him, not saying anything, and he held her close while she tried unsuccessfully not to cry.

"You left me!" she sobbed. "You left me and I was afraid I wouldn't ever see you again."

"Don't cry, Ritha." He kissed a wet cheek. "I was coming back tomorrow."

"I couldn't stay there alone today—you should know I couldn't, Nor'mon."

"I'm sorry. I wish I had stayed."

"I've been trying to find you all day but I didn't know where to leave the river. I went up it too far and had to come back. Then the sun went down and I knew I would never find you in the dark."

"I changed my mind—I decided to go on back to Caralantha."

"I was afraid you might do that, while I was out in the dark trying to find you."

He thought of the waiting ship. "Are you too tired to walk back to Caralantha tonight?"

"Whatever you want to do, Nor'mon. I'm not too tired."

She had limped when she ran to him and there were red scratches on her bare legs.

"Sit down, first," he said, "and take off your sandals."

She slipped the ragged sandals off her bare feet to expose a large purple bruise and several cuts.

"That was when I was going along under the cliffs up the river," she said. "It was all steep there, with big, loose rocks, and they rolled with me."

"I know it hurts," he said, "but I can't do much about it now. I'll take care of everything when we're home."

They went down the trail and when they reached the river she spoke wistfully:

"You said, 'When we're home.' Do you suppose we can ever really have a home together, Nor'mon?"

He did not reply. He was afraid he already knew the bleak answer.

The afterglow faded away and the stars came out. It was dark under the river's trees, with fallen limbs lying unseen across the trail. Increasingly fearful he might find the ship already gone, he held Ritha's hand to guide her and set a pace the weary, limping girl could hardly maintain.

She made no complaint, not even when she tripped and fell with a force he knew had hurt her. She was trembling when he helped her up. When he put his arm around her to steady her, he could feel the hard beating of her heart.

Some of the frantic urgency left him as he realized how near he came to hurtling ahead like a fool in pursuit of an illusion and leaving the real and living girl to stumble home through the dark alone. He walked more slowly from then on, keeping his arm around her.

The stars in the west dropped below the horizon and the star clouds of the galaxy climbed higher in the east. They seemed to rush toward the zenith with incredible speed, with such speed that morning would long since have come before the slow progress of the girl and himself took them to Caralantha.

The point of the Hunter's Arrow was almost touching the western horizon when they came, at last, to the green glades where the night-flowers bloomed pale and fragrant in the starlight.

"We're almost home," she said. "Do you remember the day we were here, Nor'mon?"

"I remember."

"And what we talked about? I wish it could all come true—I wish when we get home, the ship will be gone."

She held to his hand, even after they were out of the trees and walking up the starlit trail to her cabin.

They were halfway up the little rise when the ship came into view, looming tall and black against the stars.

Her hand gripped his convulsively and she said in a tight, small voice:

"It's still there!"

They stopped at his cabin long enough for him to find the emergency medical kit—one of the very few items not actually his own which he had taken from the ship—then they went to her cabin. He shut the door against the stir of the night breeze and lit the candle which stood on a table beside her bed.

She sat down on the edge of the bed, wearily, and looked up at him. "Nor'mon—you won't leave me anymore, will you?"

"I'll stay here with you."

"Till morning comes?"

"Till morning comes. Now take off your sandals."

She took them off and he looked in the medical kit for what he needed. He could not find it and he dumped the entire contents on the table for a better look.

Everything was there, including the anodyne-soporific syringe he had twice used on Ritha, but the special penetrating ointment for bruises was missing.

He remembered, then, he had lent it to Lokar the day before.

"Lokar has what I need over in the other end of town," he said. "There's more of it out there on the ship—"

"No!" She held his arm in protest. "Don't go to your ship—not ever!"

"All right, Ritha," he said.

He put disinfectant of the cuts and scratches and she said:

"Some hurts, like those, will finally go away. But there are other hurts, such as if I never saw you again, that could never go away."

I know, he thought, and remembered the time—never see me again—

Then Leonora was suddenly before him, standing by Ritha, the glory of her beauty transforming Ritha into no more than a sweet-faced child. The haunting, golden voice spoke to him:

The first light of morning is now in the east. Hurry, Norman—go to your ship before it's too late—

"Nor'mon!"

Ritha's cry was one of forlorn, lost hope and her face was white as death as she stared at him.

"You see her again!"

The utter despair in Ritha's cry diminished some of the force of the illusion. Leonora faded a little and the sound of her voice was gone.

It was then he saw again the anodyne-soporific syringe on the table and realized how easily he could win—how certain he could be for the Board to withdraw an empty ship.

He put his arm around Ritha's rigid shoulders.

"Believe me, Ritha—nothing they can do, from now on, can make me leave you."

She looked at him, hope flickering dimly through the dark despair on her face. "Has something changed for you?"

"I'm going to change something, if I have to, and the Board can't stop me."

"What is it?"

"I'll tell you tomorrow, after the ship is gone."

Her eyes widened. "They told you they would withdraw the ship tomorrow, didn't they?"

He hesitated, then said, "Yes, Tomorrow morning."

"Look to the east, Nor'mon—tomorrow morning is already coming."

"I know. I will be free before much longer."

"And before long—oh, so soon, now—they will try their hardest of all to make me leave you."

"And they will fail." He gently pressed her head against his shoulder. "Rest, Ritha, and sleep, and don't worry."

"I can't rest when I'm still not sure—while the ship is still out there."

"Then just lean against me, like that. So long as you are beside me, from now on, they can't touch me."

"I don't dare rest and sleep or I might wake up and find you gone, Nor'mon. So we will talk about things, about what we will do in all the years ahead of us ..."

She talked and planned a little while then the demands of her tired body took control and her head lay heavier and heavier on his shoulder. Her words trailed off into silence and she was asleep when the pale light of the morning began to dim the candle.

It was then he heard the first whisper from the ship's drive convertors, a sound like a distant sighing.

Ritha stirred in his arms. "What is that sound, Nor'mon?"

"Only the wind."

"That's the way your ship sounds before it leaves."

"The wind blowing around it can sound the same way. Go back to sleep."

She sighed and let her head rest on his shoulder again. "I'm so tired—and so afraid. Hold me tight, Nor'mon, and don't ever leave me ..."

He held her close, the way she wanted him to, and as she fell asleep the ghost of Leonora came again to mock him.

The sighing from the ship became a high-pitched moaning and he knew they were bringing the convertors up to full potential slowly, so he could have time in which to face the torment of his decision, time in which to see and hear the entreating illusion of Leonora.

But soon, now, the moaning from the ship would go up into the ultrasonic. One minute later the ship would leap skyward. He would be free ...

Hurry, Norman, Leonora was saying. So little time is left you, if we are ever to meet again ...

The moaning from the ship lifted into a high keening. Leonora stood just before him, her eyes bright with tears.

Don't forsake me, Norman. Don't make me wait in vain for the one—her voice broke with near-crying—for the one I loved more than life itself ...

The illusion of the real and living Leonora pleading with him came so strongly it was hard to remember the sleeping girl in his arms. He reached quickly for the anodyne-soporific syringe on the table, knowing he would have to use it, thinking, One quick jab with this needle and Leonora and the ship will have been gone for hours when I awaken ...

The high keening from the ship lifted into inaudibility. One minute was left for him.

Please, Norman—there was the touch of Leonora's hand on his arm and her cheeks were wet with tears as they had been so long ago—if you ever loved me—if you ever want to find me again ...

He held the point of the needle against his arm and asked himself the question:

Which do I want, the happiness of myself and Ritha or the loneliness of forever following an illusion across the galaxy?

There was no problem. It was the lives and happiness of himself and Ritha against nothing else.

Against nothing else?

True realization came to him with such force he sat motionless and not breathing for a moment.

The lives and happiness of himself and Ritha were pitted against the lives and happiness of nine hundred thousand who loved life as he and Ritha did and who among them loved each other with the same desperate fear of being parted by death as he and Ritha feared being parted by his going.

Nine hundred thousand living, loving girls and boys, men and women, whose lives were in his hands ...

He put the syringe back on the table. Very gently, as one would do with a sleeping child, he laid Ritha on the bed. She stirred restlessly and reached out blindly for him with one hand.

"It's all right," he said to her. He knelt beside her and brushed the dark hair back from her face. "Go to sleep, Ritha darling."

Reassured, she relaxed again. He saw the dawn was red-gold in the eastern sky as he stood, seeing her for the last time.

She looked like a little bare-footed china doll, a tired and weary little doll that somehow had tear-stains on its cheeks. He turned away and left her, knowing the way he would always remember her.

The ship was a black silhouette against the flaming eastern sky. He ran to it, then turned when he was within the airlock and looked back at Ritha's cabin and the town and the river beyond. The golden lark was singing from the trees where Ritha had wanted their house to be, singing high and sweet and clear to the new dawn.

Then he pressed the buttons that would withdraw the ramp and close the airlock. They whirred swiftly into place, shutting out the sight of Ritha's cabin, the light of the dawn, and the sound of the tiny lark's singing.

He took the elevator to the control room and hurried to the pilot's chair. The blue light of the communicator was blinking but his attention froze on the viewscreen.

Ritha was running out from the cabin, already almost to the ship, her upturned face pale under her dark hair and her arms outstretched as though she might reach the ship and hold it back. It seemed to him he could hear her calling him, desperate and pleading:

"Nor'mon—wait!"

He jabbed the Davis Field button and the orange light flashed on. He pressed the acceleration button and the ship lurched and settled him deep in the seat with the force of its skyward leap. It trembled as the air screamed and thundered past, and Hardeen fell away from under him.

Within seconds the face of Hardeen was round and curving. The site of Caralantha was a tiny sapphire bay, a bay that dwindled into invisibility as he looked at it.

He switched on the communicator and Gault spoke:

"So you decided to go on?"

"You knew I would, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"I had a way to overcome anything you might do to me from the ship."

"But you didn't use it. All you Advance Ship men have a certain basic characteristic—that is why so many of you were tried and so few chosen."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean when the time of decision came, you could not place your own happiness above the lives of those who depend upon you."

He made no reply and Gault said:

"The lives of all the emigrants are in the hands of you Advance Ship men. A world must be found for them. For you and all the others, I hope it will be soon.

"Good luck to you, Grey, wherever you may have to go."

"Thanks," he said briefly, and switched off the communicator. He put the drive into full acceleration and knew once again he was being hurled into the paradox of tau lag immortality.

Far behind him the dead, black heart of a star was sweeping on to keep its rendezvous with a yellow sun and destroy a solar system. Far behind him the Emigrant ships were coming, ship after ship, and in the end they would reach back a hundred and ninety years.

And somewhere else behind him, recently so very near, a golden lark was singing to the new dawn and a barefoot girl was crying beneath an empty sky ...

The days dragged by like eternities in the lonely, silent ship. He saw Ritha wherever he turned, in the pilot's chair, the night they had flown south of the Barrier, in the medical room, where he had removed an arrow from under her heart, in the reception room, where she had first unintentionally let him know she loved him ...

The tau lag mockery increased as the days went by. Each year, for her, would be only seven days and eight hours for him. He wondered, at the end of the first week, if she still watched the Hunter's Arrow at night and perhaps thought of him with a wistful sigh as she wondered where he might be. Two weeks went by and he wondered if her memory of him had not long since been overshadowed by her love for some Valan man. Three weeks went by, in which his longing for her was an almost unbearable torture, and he wondered if she was already proudly holding in her arms the baby her love for someone else had caused to be created.

The bitter, lonely weeks came, at last, to an end. The yellow sun was blazing before him and the second planet was remotely Earth-type. He made a survey circuit of it and landed on a rocky island. He switched off the Davis Field. Its orange light continued to burn as he turned on the communicator.

A familiar voice, aged by twenty years, spoke to him:

"Hello, Grey. This is still Gault. What have you found?"

"This one is mainly ocean," he reported. "No life except sea life, but that will take care of the Emigrants' food problem when they arrive. I'll plant some seeds on the islands that look the most promising and I'll mark such mineral deposits as are here. I'll be on my way again within a week ..."

He finished the report to Gault and took the elevator to the airlock. The auxiliary warning light of the Davis Field was burning above it and he waited until it went out, then he pushed the button that would drop the landing ramp.

He hesitated before opening the airlock, remembering the last time he had looked out through it and had seen Caralantha at dawn, and the cabin where a scared, tired girl was just awakening to the realization he had left her.

But twenty years had gone by for Ritha. If she was still alive she would long since have been a wife and mother who only occasionally remembered, and then probably with mature amusement at the folly of youth, that she had once thought she loved a man named Nor'mon.

So he would open the airlock and there would be no Ritha, no lark singing to the dawn. He would see a lonely little island, with an endless blue sea and an endless blue sky meeting on the faraway horizon and the golden light of the rising sun shining down on nothing that lived or moved ...

He pressed the button and the airlock slid open. He saw what he expected, the barren little island, the endless sea and sky, the light of the sun shining on it all.

And he saw Ritha.

He stood motionless and staring, his heart pounding, not daring to believe.

She saw him and in her eyes, even at the distance, he could see the look of almost disbelieving happiness. Then she was running toward him, her bruised and scratched bare feet and legs like they had been twenty years before, her arms out-stretched, crying, "Nor'mon! ..."

He ran to meet her and their arms went around each other. She was real—she was the warm and vibrant and living Ritha he had thought he lost ...

There was a confused conflict of questions: "Nor'mon—where are we?" and "Ritha—how did you come here?"

In answer to his own question, Ritha said, "I don't know how I came here, Nor'mon. I was running to your ship, begging you to wait for me, and then I felt like I was—like I was coming apart in some way. The next thing I knew I was all together again, and we were here."

He remembered the lark that should not have been on Hardeen and the bears that had killed Gonzales and he knew the answer.

"Let's go into the ship, Ritha," he said. "There is something that Earth has to know about."

Gault answered when they were in the control room to ask in his tired old voice, "Have you found something new, Grey?"

"I did. Can you there on Earth—and the ones in the Emigrant ships—duplicate the malfunction of my Davis Field?"

"Yes, very easily. Why do you ask?"

"Because that is the answer to all problems—because now the Emigrant ships can go to the end of the galaxy, if necessary, without way stations."

Gault asked with the life of sudden hop in his voice, "What do you mean?"

"Remember the lark on Hardeen? It was not in my ship when I landed there. And the bear-things that killed Gonzales—they were not in his ship. Now it has happened for the third time. There was a girl on Hardeen, running to my ship when I switched on the Davis Field. She was here when I opened the airlock."

There was a silence and then Gault said, "Do you mean they were caught up in the Field--?"

"Yes. Any living thing caught in the outer shell of the Davis Field, when it's in the condition of mine, will be transformed into disassociated molecules. But there is some kind of pattern retention and when the Field collapses they are reformed exactly the same as before.

"So all the people on the Emigrant ships can go in the Field, without need of food for hundreds of years, and the food needed by the pilot and his crew will last for centuries. And you on Earth can build big, almost skeleton ships that are mainly Drive and Davis Field. Let all but the crew go in the Field and every last human on Earth can have a way to be saved from the nova. Can you do that in ten years?"

"Yes—but are you sure?"

"The girl who was running to my ship on Hardeen is standing beside me now. She has not aged even one hour. But there is one thing you and the Board will do, Gault—"

"What is that?"

"Let her go with me. I'm going to find a world for the Emigrants if it takes the rest of my life—but she is going with me."

Again there was silence, then Gault said in a voice no longer tired and old, "When you force yourself to leave her for the first time, you—and she—did something that caused the discovery of a way for all of us to live. No attempt will be made to separate you."

He and Ritha stood outside the ship and watched the morning sun send lances of gold across the blue sea.

"We won't be here long, will we?" Ritha said. "There isn't much to do. Then we'll go on to the next world. Maybe that will be the one we're looking for. If not we'll continue—beyond another sun, and another, until we find it."

"Ritha," he said, "are you sure you will never wish you stayed on Hardeen—are you sure you will never tire of going on and on until maybe we're both old and all the enchantment of this kind of life has gone for you?"

"Am I sure?" she asked. "I had no one and nothing on Hardeen—but you. Now, I have you again. You said once you hoped to find happiness beyond another sun—"

She looked up at him, the love bright and wonderful on her face. "My happiness will be with you—beyond another sun—beyond a thousand suns. You will never find the chance to leave me again, Nor'mon."

The End

* * * * * *

BEYOND

ANOTHER

SUN

BY TOM GODWIN

Modern Literary Editions Publishing Company

New York, N.Y.

Copyright © 1971 by Tom Godwin

Printed in the United States of America

Curtis Books

502-07129-075

75¢

* * * * * *

Inside Cover ...

ONE LAST CHANCE

As his ship hovered over the new planet, Grey looked out and saw green hills, deep forests and wild rivers, but no sign of life. He closed his eyes and prayed—prayed for the first time in his life—that his greatest fear was not about to become true ...

* * * * * *

Back Cover ...

a desperate mission

One hundred and fifty earth years had passed since Norman Grey first plunged his terran starship into the infinity of outer space. His mission: to find a new world for the people of the doomed earth before mankind was blown to bits.

He had visited many strange and cruel worlds during his endless journey. He had seen creatures more horrible and weird than any human mind could imagine. Still he hadn't found a new home for the human race. And time was running out ...

COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED

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