Return from the Stars

SEVEN

One night, very late, we lay spent; Eri’s head, turned to one side, rested in the crook of my arm. Raising my eyes to the open window, I saw the stars in the gaps among the clouds. There was no wind, the curtain hung frozen like some pale phantom, but now a desolate wave approached from the open ocean, and I could hear the long rumble announcing it, then the ragged roar of the breakers on the beach, then silence for several heartbeats, and again the unseen water stormed the night shore. But I hardly noticed this steadily repeated reminder of my presence on Earth, for my eyes were fixed on the Southern Cross, in which Beta had been our guiding star; every day I took bearings by it, automatically, my thoughts on other things; it had led us unfailingly, a never-fading beacon in space. I could almost feel in my hands the metal grips I would shift to bring the point of light, distinct in the darkness, to the center of the field of vision, with the soft rubber rim of the eyepiece against my brows and cheeks. Beta, one of the more distant stars, hardly changed at all when we reached our destination. It shone with the same indifference, though the Southern Cross had long since disappeared to us because we had gone deep into its arms, and then that white point of light, that giant star, no longer was what it had seemed at the beginning, a challenge; its immutability revealed its true meaning, that it was a witness to our transience, to the indifference of the void, the universe — an indifference that no one is ever able to accept.

But now, trying to catch the sound of Eri’s breathing between the rumbles of the Pacific, I was incredulous. I said to myself silently: It’s true, it’s true, I was there; but my wonder remained.

Eri gave a start. I began to move away, to make more room for her, but suddenly I felt her gaze on me.

“You’re not asleep?” I whispered. And leaned over, wanting to touch her lips with mine, but she put the tips of her fingers on my mouth. She held them there for a moment, then moved them along the collarbone to the chest, felt the hard hollow between my ribs, and pressed her palm to it.

“What’s this?” she whispered.

“A scar.”

“What happened?”

“I had an accident.”

She became silent. I could feel her looking at me. She lifted her head. Her eyes were all darkness, without a glimmer in them; I could see the outline of her arm, moving with her breath, white.

“Why don’t you tell me anything?”

“Eri… ?”

“Why don’t you want to talk?”

“About the stars?” I suddenly understood. She was silent. I did not know what to say.

“You think I wouldn’t understand?”

I looked at her closely, through the darkness, as the ocean’s roar ebbed and flowed through the room, and did not know how to explain it to her.

“Eri…”

I tried to take her in my arms. She freed herself and sat up in bed.

“You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. But tell me why, at least.”

“You don’t know? You really don’t?”

“Now, maybe. You wanted… to spare me?”

“No. I’m simply afraid.”

“Of what?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t want to dig it all up. It’s not that I’m denying any of it. That would be impossible, anyway. But talking about it would mean — or so it seems to me — shutting myself up in it. Away from everyone, everything, from what is… now.”

“I understand,” she said quietly. The white smudge of her face disappeared, she had lowered her head. “You think that I don’t value it.”

“No, no,” I tried to interrupt her.

“Wait, now it’s my turn. What I think about astronautics, and the fact that I would never leave Earth, that’s one thing. But it has nothing to do with you and me. Though actually it does: because we are together. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be, ever. For me — it means you. That is why I would like… but you don’t have to. If it is as you say. If you feel like that.”

“I’ll tell you.”

“But not today.”

“Today.”

“Lie back.”

I fell on the pillows. She tiptoed to the window, a whiteness in the gloom. Drew the curtain. The stars vanished, there was only the slow roar of the Pacific, returning repeatedly with a dreary persistence. I could see practically nothing. The moving air betrayed her steps, the bed sagged.

“Did you ever see a ship of the class of the Prometheus?”

“No.”

“It’s large. On Earth, it would weigh over three hundred thousand tons.”

“And there were so few of you?”

“Twelve. Tom Arder, Olaf, Arne, Thomas — the pilots, along with myself. And the seven scientists. If you think that it was empty there, you are wrong. Propulsion takes up nine-tenths of the mass. Photoaggregates. Storage, supplies, reserve units. The actual living quarters are small. Each of us had a cabin, in addition to the common ones. In the middle part of the body — the control center and the small landing rockets, and the probes, even smaller, for collecting samples from the corona…”

“And you were over Arcturus in one of those?”

“Yes. As was Arder.”

“Why didn’t you fly together?”

“In one rocket? It’s riskier that way.”

“How?”

“A probe is a cooling system. A sort of flying refrigerator. Just enough room to sit down in. You sit inside a shell of ice. The ice melts from the shield and refreezes on the pipes. The air compressors can be damaged. All it takes is a moment, because outside the temperature is ten, twelve thousand degrees. When the pipes stop in a two-man rocket, two men die. This way, only one. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

She put her hand on that unfeeling part of my chest.

“And this… happened there?”

“No, Eri; shall I tell you?”

“All right.”

“Only don’t think… No one knows about this.”

“This?”

The scar stood out under the warmth of her flngers — as if returning to life.

“Yes.”

“How is that possible? What about Olaf?”

“Not even Olaf. No one knows. I lied to them, Eri. Now I have to tell you, since I’ve started. Eri… it happened in the sixth year. We were on our way back then, but in cloudy regions you can’t move quickly. It’s a magnificent sight; the faster the ship travels, the stronger the luminescence of the cloud. We had a tail behind us, not like the tail of a comet, more a polar aurora, thin at the sides, deep into the sky, toward Alpha Eridanus, for thousands and thousands of kilometers… Arder and Ennesson were gone by then. Venturi was dead, too. I would wake at six in the morning, when the light was changing from blue to white. I heard Olaf speaking from the controls. He had spotted something interesting. I went down. The radar showed a spot, slightly off our course. Thomas came, and we wondered what the thing could be. It was too big for a meteor, and, anyway, meteors never occur singly. We reduced speed. This woke the rest. When they joined us, I remember, Thomas said it had to be a ship. We often joked like that. In space there must be ships from other systems, but two mosquitoes released at opposite ends of the Earth would stand a better chance of meeting. We had reached a gap now in the cloud, and the cold, nebular dust became so dispersed that you could see stars of the sixth magnitude with the naked eye. The spot turned out to be a planetoid. Something like Vesta. A quarter of a billion tons, perhaps more. Extraordinarily regular, almost spherical. Which is quite rare. Two milliparsecs off the bow. It was traveling, and we followed. Thurber asked me if we could get closer. I said we could, by a quarter of a milliparsec.

“We drew nearer. Through the telescope it looked like a porcupine, a ball bristling with spines. An oddity. Belonged in a museum. Thurber started arguing with Biel about its origin, whether tectonic or not. Thomas butted in, saying that this could be determined. There would be no loss of energy, we hadn’t even begun to accelerate. He would fly there, take a few specimens, return. Gimma hesitated. Time presented no problem — we had some to spare. Finally he agreed. No doubt because I was present. Although I hadn’t said a thing. Perhaps because of that. Because our relationship had become… but that’s another story. We stopped; a maneuver of this kind takes time, and meanwhile the planetoid moved away, but we had it on radar. I was worried, because from the time we started back we had nothing but trouble. Breakdowns, not serious but hard to fix — and happening without any apparent reason. I’m not superstitious, but I believe in series. Still, I had no argument against his going. It made me look childish, but I checked out Thomas’s engine myself and told him to be careful. With the dust.”

“The what?”

“Dust. In the region of a cold cloud, you see, planetoids act like vacuum cleaners. They remove the dust from the space in their path, and this goes on over a long period of time. The dust settles in layers, which can double the size of the planetoid. A blast from a jet nozzle or even a heavy step is enough to set up a swirling cloud of dust that hangs above the surface. May not sound serious, but you can’t see a thing. I told him that. But he knew it as well as I did. Olaf launched him off the ship’s side, I went up to navigation and began to guide him down. I saw him approach the planetoid, maneuver, turn his rocket, and descend to the surface, like on a rope. Then, of course, I lost sight of him. But that was five kilometers…”

“You picked him up on radar?”

“No, on the optical, that is, by telescope. Infrared. But I could talk to him the whole time. On the radio. Just as I was thinking that I hadn’t seen Thomas make such a careful landing in a long time — we had all become careful on the way back — I saw a small flash, and a dark stain began to spread across the surface of the planetoid. Gimma, standing next to me, shouted. He thought that Thomas, to brake at the last moment, had hit the flame. That’s an expression we use. You give one short blast of the engine, naturally not in such circumstances. And I knew that Thomas would never have done that. It had to be lightning.”

“Lightning? There?”

“Yes. You see, any body moving at high speed through a cloud builds up charge, static electricity, from friction. There was a difference in potential between the Prometheus and the planetoid. It could have been billions of volts. More, even. When Thomas landed, a spark leapt. That was the flash, and because of the sudden heat the dust rose, and in a minute the entire surface was covered by a cloud. We couldn’t hear him — his radio just crackled. I was furious, mainly at myself, for having underestimated. The rocket had special lightning conductors, pronged, and the charge should have passed quietly into St. Elmo’s fire. But it didn’t. It was exceptionally powerful. Gimma asked me when I thought the dust would settle. Thurber didn’t ask; it was clear that it would take days.”

“Days?”

“Yes. Because the gravity was extremely low. If you dropped a stone, it would fall for several hours before hitting the ground. Think how much longer it would take dust to settle after being thrown up a hundred meters. I told Gimma to go about his business, because we had to wait.”

“And nothing could be done?”

“No. If I could be sure that Thomas was still inside his rocket, I would have taken a chance — turned the Prometheus around, got close to the planetoid, and blasted the dust off to all four corners of the galaxy — but I could not be sure. And finding him? The surface of the planetoid had an area equal to, I don’t know, that of Corsica. Besides, in the dust cloud you could walk right by him at arm’s length and not see him. There was only one solution. He had it at his fingertips. He could have taken off and returned.”

“He didn’t do that?”

“No.”

“Do you know why?”

“I can guess. He would have had to take off blind. I could see that the cloud reached, well, not quite a kilometer above the surface, but he didn’t know that. He was afraid of hitting an overhang or a rock. He might have landed on the bottom of some deep gorge. So we hung there a day, two days; he had enough oxygen and provisions for six. Emergency rations. No I one was in a position to do anything. We paced and thought up ways of getting Thomas out of this mess. Emitters. Different wavelengths. We even threw down flares. They didn’t work, that cloud was as dark as a tomb. A third day — a third night. Our measurements showed that the cloud was settling, but I wasn’t sure it would finish coming down in the seventy hours left to Thomas. He could last without food far longer, but not without oxygen. Then I got an idea. I reasoned this way: Thomas’s rocket was made primarily of steel. Provided there were no iron ores on that damned planetoid, it might be possible to locate him with a ferromagnetic indicator — a device for finding iron objects. We had a highly sensitive one. It could pick up a nail at a distance of three-quarters of a kilometer. A rocket at several kilometers. Olaf and I went over the apparatus. Then I told Gimma and took off.”

“Alone.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because without Thomas there were only the two of us, and the Prometheus had to have a pilot.”

“And they agreed to it?”

I smiled in the darkness.

“I was the First Pilot. Gimma could not give rne orders, only suggest, I would weigh the chances and say yes or no. Most of the time, of course, I said yes. But in emergencies the decision was mine.”

“And Olaf?”

“Well, you know Olaf a little by now. As you might imagine, I couldn’t take off right away. But when it came down to it, I was the one who had sent Thomas out. Olaf couldn’t deny that. So I took off. Without a rocket, of course.”

“Without a rocket… ?”

“Yes, in a suit, with a gas shooter. It took a while, but not so very long. I had some trouble with the detector, which was practically a chest, awkward to handle. Weightless, of course, but when I was entering the cloud, I had to be careful not to hit anything. I ceased to see the cloud as I approached it; first the stars began to disappear, a few at a time, on the periphery, then half the sky got black; I looked back and saw the Prometheus glowing in the distance — she had special equipment that made the hull luminous. Looked like a long white pencil with a ball at one end, the photon headlight. Then everything winked out. The transition was so abrupt. Maybe a second of black mist, then nothing. My radio was disconnected; instead, I had the detector hooked up to the earphones. It took me only a few minutes to fly to the edge of the cloud, but over two hours to drop to the surface — I had to be careful. The electric flashlight was useless, as I had expected. I began the search. You know what stalactites look like in caves…”

“Yes.”

“Something like that, only more outlandish. I’m talking about what I saw later, when the dust settled, because during my search I couldn’t see a thing, as if someone had poured tar over the window of my suit. The box I had on straps. I moved the antenna and listened, then walked with both arms extended — I’d never stumbled so much in my life. No harm, thanks only to the low gravity. With just a little visibility, of course, a man could have regained his balance ten times over. But this way — it’s hard to explain to someone who’s never experienced it — the planetoid was all jagged peaks, with boulders piled up around them, and wherever I put my foot I began falling, in that drunken slow motion, and I couldn’t jump back up: that would send me soaring for a quarter of an hour. I simply had to wait, keep trying to walk on. The rubble slid beneath me, debris, pillars, shards of rock, everything was barely held in place, the force that held them was unusually weak — which does not mean that if a boulder landed on a man, it would not kill him. The mass would act then, not the weight; there would be time to jump clear, of course, if you could see the thing falling… or at least hear it. But, then, there was no air, so it was only by the vibration under my feet that I could tell whether I had again sent some rock structure toppling, and I could do nothing but wait for a fragment to come out of the pitch-dark and begin to crush me… I wandered about for hours and no longer thought that my idea of using the detector was brilliant. I also had to be careful because now and then I would find myself in the air, that is, floating, as in some clownish dream. At last I caught a signal. I must have lost it eight times, I don’t remember exactly, but by the time I found the rocket, it was night on the Prometheus.

“The rocket stood at an angle, half-buried in that fiendish dust. The softest, most delicate stuff you can imagine. Almost insubstantial. The lightest fluff on Earth would offer more resistance. The particles were so incredibly small… I checked inside the rocket; he was not there. I’ve said that it stood at an angle, but I wasn’t at all sure; it was impossible to find the vertical without using special equipment, and that would’ve taken at least an hour, and a conventional plumb line, weighing practically nothing, was useless, since the bob wouldn’t have held the string tight… I wasn’t surprised, then, that he hadn’t tried to take off. I entered. I saw immediately that he had jury-rigged something to determine the vertical but that it hadn’t worked. There was plenty of food left, but no oxygen. He must have transferred it all to the tank on his suit and left.”

“Why?”

“Yes, why. He had been there three days. In that type of rocket you have only a seat, a screen, the control, levers, and a hatch at the rear. I sat there for a while. I realized that I would never be able to find him. For a second I thought that possibly he had gone out just as I landed, that he’d used his gas shooter to return to the Prometheus and was sitting on board now, while I wandered over these drunken stones… I jumped out of the rocket so energetically that I flew upward. No sense of direction, nothing. You know how it is when you see a spark in total darkness? The eyes fantasize, there are rays, visions. Well, with the sense of balance, something similar can happen. In zero gravity there’s no problem, a person accustoms himself. But when gravity is extremely weak, as on that planetoid, the inner ear reacts erratically, if not irrationally. You think you’re zooming up like a Roman candle, then plummeting, and so on, all the time. And then the sensations of spinning and shifting, of the arms, legs, torso — as if the parts of your body changed places and your head wasn’t where it belonged…

“That was how f flew, until I collided with a wall, bounced off it, caught on something, was sent rolling, but managed to grab hold of a projecting rock… Someone lay there. Thomas.”

She was silent. In the darkness the Pacific roared.

“No, not what you think. He was alive. He sat up at once. I switched on the radio. At that short distance we could communicate perfectly.

“‘Is that you?’ I heard him say.

“‘It’s me,’ I said. A scene from a ridiculous farce, it was so farfetched. Yet that’s how it was. We got to our feet.

“‘How do you feel?’ I asked.

“‘Fine. And you?’

“This surprised me a little, but I said:

“‘Very well, thank you. And everyone at home, too, is in good health.’

“Idiotic, but I thought that he was talking this way to show that he was holding up, you know?”

“I understand.”

“When he stood close to me, I saw him as a patch of denser darkness in the light of my shoulder lamp. I ran my hands over his suit — it was undamaged.

“‘Do you have enough oxygen?’ I asked. That was the most important thing.

“‘Who cares?’ he said.

“I wondered what to do next. Start up his rocket? That would be too risky. To tell the truth, I wasn’t even very pleased. I was afraid — or, rather, unsure — it is difficult to explain. The situation was unreal, I sensed something strange in it, what exactly I didn’t know, I was not even fully aware of how I felt. Only that I wasn’t pleased by this miraculous discovery. I tried to figure out how the rocket could be saved. But that, I thought, was not the most important thing. First I had to see what shape he was in. We stood there, in a night without stars.

“‘What have you been doing all this time?’ I asked. This was important. If he had tried to do anything at all, even to take a few mineral samples, that would be a good sign.

“‘Different things,’ he said. ‘And what have you been doing, Tom?’

“‘What Tom?’ I asked and went cold, because Arder had been dead a year, and he knew that very well.

“‘But you’re Tom. Aren’t you? I recognize your voice.’

“I said nothing; with his gloved hand he touched my suit and said:

“‘Nasty, isn’t it? Nothing to see, and nothing there. I had pictured it differently. What about you?’

“I thought that he was imagining things in connection with Arder… That had happened to more than one of us.

“‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it isn’t too interesting here. Let’s go, what do you say, Thomas?’

“‘Go?’ He was surprised. ‘What are you talking about, Tom?’

“I no longer paid attention to his ‘Tom.’

“‘You want to stay here?’ I said.

“‘And you don’t?’

“He is pulling my leg, I thought, but enough of these stupid jokes.

“‘No,’ I said. ‘We must get back. Where is your pistol?’

“‘I lost it when I died.’

“‘What?’

“‘But I didn’t mind,’ he said. ‘A dead man doesn’t need a pistol.’

“‘Well, well,’ I said. ‘Come, I’ll strap you to me and we’ll go.’

“‘Are you crazy, Tom? Go where?’

“‘Back to the Prometheus.’

“‘But it isn’t here…’

“‘It’s out there. Let me strap you up.’

“‘Wait.’

“He pushed me away.

“‘You speak strangely. You’re not Tom!’

“‘That’s right. I’m Hal.’

“‘You died, too? When?’

“I now saw what was up, and I decided to go along with his game.

“‘Oh,’ I said, ‘a few days ago. Now let me strap you…’

“He didn’t want to. We began to banter back and forth, first as if good-naturedly, but then it grew more serious; I tried to take hold of him, but couldn’t, in the suit. What was I to do? I couldn’t leave him, not even for a moment — I would never find him a second time. Miracles don’t happen twice. And he wanted to remain there, as a dead man. Then, when I thought I had convinced him, when he seemed ready to agree — and I gave him my gas shooter to hold — he put his face close to mine, so that I could almost see him through the double glass, and shouted, ‘You bastard! You tricked me! You’re alive!’ — and he shot me.”

For some time now I had felt Eri’s face pressed to my back. At these last words she jerked, as if a current had passed through her, and covered the scar with her hand. We lay in silence for a while.

“It was a very good suit,” I said. “It wasn’t pierced at all. It bent into me, broke a rib, tore some muscles, but wasn’t pierced. I didn’t even lose consciousness, but my right arm wouldn’t move for a while and a warm sensation told me I was bleeding. For a moment, however, I must have been in a muddle, because when I got up Thomas was gone. I searched for him, groping on all fours, but instead of him I found the shooter. He must have thrown it down immediately after firing. With the shooter I made it back to the ship. They saw me the moment I left the dust cloud. Olaf brought the ship up and they pulled me in. I said that I had not been able to find him. That I had found only the empty rocket, and that the shooter had fallen from my hand and gone off when I stumbled. The suit was double-layered. A piece of the metal lining came away. I have it here, under my rib.”

Again, silence and the thunder of a wave, crescendoing, as if gathering itself for a leap across the entire beach, undaunted by the failure of its innumerable predecessors. Breaking, it surged, was dashed, became a soft pulse, closer and quieter, then completely still.

“You flew away… ?”

“No. We waited. After two more days the cloud settled, and I went down a second time. Alone. You understand why, apart from all the other reasons?”

“I understand.”

“I found him quickly; his suit gleamed in the darkness. He lay at the foot of a pinnacle. His face was not visible, the glass was frosted on the inside, and when I lifted him up I thought, for a moment, that I was holding an empty suit — he weighed almost nothing. But it was he. I left him and returned in his rocket. Later, I examined it carefully and found out what had happened. His clock had stopped, an ordinary clock — he had lost all sense of time. The clock measured hours and days. I fixed it and put it back, so no one would suspect.”

I embraced her. My breath stirred her hair. She touched the scar, and suddenly what had been a caress became a question.

“Its shape…”

“Peculiar, isn’t it? It was sewed up twice, the stitches broke the first time… Thurber did the sewing. Because Venturi, our doctor, was dead by then.”

“The one who gave you the red book?”

“Yes. How did you know that, Eri — did I tell you? No, that’s impossible.”

“You were talking to Olaf, before — you remember…”

“That’s right. But imagine your remembering that! Such a small thing. I’m really a swine. I left it on the Prometheus, with everything else.”

“You have things there? On Luna?”

“Yes. But it isn’t worth dragging them here.”

“It is, Hal.”

“Darling, it would turn the place into a memorial museum. I hate that sort of thing. If I bring them back, it will only be to burn them. I’ll keep a few small things I have, to remember the others by. That stone…”

“What stone?”

“I have a lot of stones. There’s one from Kereneia, one from Thomas’s planetoid — only don’t think that I went around collecting! They simply got struck in the ridges of my boots; Olaf would pry them out and put them away, complete with labels. I couldn’t get that idea out of his head. This is not important but… I have to tell you. Yes, I ought to, actually, so you won’t think that everything there was terrible and that nothing ever happened except death. Try to imagine… a fusion of worlds. First, pink, at its lightest, most delicate, an infinity of pink, and within it, penetrating it, a darker pink, and, farther off, a red, almost blue, but much farther off, and all around, a phosphorescence, weightless, not like a cloud, not like a mist — different. I have no words for it. The two of us stepped from the rocket and stared. Eri, I don’t understand that. Do you know, even now I get a tightness in the throat, it was so beautiful. Just think: there is no life there, no plants, animals, birds, nothing; no eyes to witness it. I am positive that from the creation of the world no one had gazed upon it, that we were the first, Arder and I, and if it hadn’t been for the gravimeter’s breaking down and our landing to calibrate it, because the quartz shattered and the mercury ran out, then no one, to the end of the world, would have stood there and seen it. Isn’t that strange? One had an urge to — well; I don’t know. We couldn’t leave. We forgot why we had landed, we stood just like that, stood and stared.”

“What was it, Hal?”

“I don’t know. When we returned and told the others, Biel wanted to go, but it wasn’t possible. Not enough power in reserve. We’d taken plenty of shots, but nothing came out. In the photographs it looked like pink milk with purple palisades, and Biel went on about the chemiluminescence of the silicon hydride vapors; I doubt that he believed that, but in despair, since he would never be able to investigate it, he tried to come up with some explanation. It was like… like nothing. We have no referents. No analogies. It possessed immense depth, but was not a landscape. Those different shades, as I said, more and more distant and dark, until your eyes swam. Motion — none, really. It floated and stood still. It changed, as if it breathed, yet remained the same; perhaps the most important thing was its enormity. As if beyond this cruel black eternity there existed another eternity, another infinity, so concentrated and mighty, so bright, that if you closed your eyes you would no longer believe in it. When we looked at each other… you’d have to know Arder. I’ll show you his photograph. There was a man — bigger than I am, he looked like he could walk through any wall without even noticing. Always spoke slowly. You heard about that… hole on Kereneia?”

“Yes.”

“He got stuck there, in the rock, hot mud was boiling under him, at any moment it could come gushing up through the tube where he was trapped, and he said, ‘Hal, hold on. I’ll take one more look around. Perhaps if I remove the bottle — no. It won’t, my straps are tangled. But hold on.’ And so on. You would have thought that he was talking on the telephone, from his hotel room. It was not a pose, he was like that. The most level-headed among us: always weighing. That was why he flew with me afterward, not with Olaf, who was his friend — but you heard about that.”

“Yes.”

“So… Arder. When I looked at him there, he had tears in his eyes. Tom Arder. He wasn’t ashamed of them, either, not then or later. Whenever we talked about it — and we did from time to time, coming back to it — the others would get angry. They thought we were putting on an act, pretending or something. Because we became so… beatific. Funny, isn’t it? Anyway. We looked at each other and the same thought entered our minds, even though we did not know if we would be able to calibrate the gravimeter properly — our only chance of finding the Prometheus. Our thought was this, that it had been worth it. Just to be able to stand there and behold that majesty.”

“You were standing on a hill?”

“I don’t know. Eri, it was a different kind of perspective. We looked as if from a great height, yet it was not an elevation. Wait a moment. Have you seen the Grand Canyon, in Colorado?

“I have.”

“Imagine that that canyon is a thousand times larger. Or a million. That it is made of red and pink gold, almost completely transparent, that through it you can see all the strata, geological folds, anticlines and synclines; that all this is weightless, floating and seeming to smile at you. No, that doesn’t do it. Darling, both Arder and I tried terribly hard to tell the others, but we failed. The stone is from there… Arder picked it up for luck. He always had it with him. He had it with him on Kereneia. Kept it in a box for vitamin pills. When it began to crumble he wrapped it in cotton. Later — after I returned without him — I found the stone under the bed of his cabin. It must have fallen there. I think Olaf believed that that was the reason, but he didn’t dare say this, it was too stupid… What could a stone have to do with the wire that caused the failure of Ardor’s radio…?”