Time Traders

The story made sense—in a crazy kind of way. Travis mechanically handed Ashe the small tool he was groping for in the tangled grass.

“But how did the ship get there?” he asked. “Was there an early civilization on earth which had space travel?”

“That was what we thought—until we found the ship. No, it was from the outside—a cargo freighter lost from some galactic run. Either this world was an astrogation menace of the same type as a reef at sea, or there was some other reason to cause forced landings here. We brought film from the Russian time station pinpointing about a dozen such wrecks. And some of those were on this side of the Atlantic.”

“You’re planning to dig for one of those here?”

Ashe laughed. “What d’you think we’d find after about fifteen thousand years and a lot of land upheaval, even local volcanic activity? We want our ship in as good condition as possible.”

“To study?”

“With caution. If you’d check with Ross Murdock he’d give you a good reason for the caution. He was one of our agents who was actually aboard the ship the Russians were plundering. When they cornered him in the control cabin, he accidentally activated the com system and called in the real owners. They weren’t too pleased with the Russians—came down and destroyed their time base on that level and then followed them through the other way stations, destroying each. Remember that hush-hush bang in the Baltic early this year? That was the ‘space patrol,’ or whatever they call themselves, putting finis to the Russian project. So far as we know they didn’t discover that we were and are interested in the same thing. So if we find our ship here, we walk softly along its corridors.”

“You want the cargo?”

“In part. But mostly we want the knowledge—what its designers had—the key to space.”

The thrill of that touched Travis. Mankind had reached for the stars for three generations. Men had had small successes, many searing failures. Now—what were missions to the barren moon compared to star flight and what lay far out?

Ashe, reading his expression, smiled. “You feel it too, don’t you?”

The Apache nodded absently, gazing down the canyon. He tried to believe that somewhere around here, trapped in time, a wrecked star ship lay waiting for them. But he could not even visualize this country as it must have been in pluvial times. When rain fell most of the year, it must have made a morass of these lands. The retreating arms of shrinking glaciers lay not too far northward.

“But why the Folsom points?” Out of the welter of facts and half facts he picked that as a starting point.

“We’ve sent back agents disguised as pre-Celts, as Tartars—or their remote ancestors—as Bronze Age Beaker Traders, and in half a hundred other character parts. Now there’s a chance we may have to produce a few Folsom spearmen. One of the first and most important rules of this game, Fox, is that one does not interfere with time by introducing any modernisms. There must be no hint of our agents’ real identity. We have no idea what might happen if one meddled with the stream of history as we know it, and we trust we’ll never have to find out the hard way.”

“Hunters,” Travis said slowly, hardly aware at that moment that he spoke at all. “Mammoth—mastodon—camels—the dire wolf—sabertooth—”

“Why do all those interest you?”

“Why?” Travis echoed and then stopped to examine his reasons. Why had his reaction to Ashe’s picture of the drifting prehistoric hunters in disguise been his own quick inner vision of a land peopled with strange beasts his own race had never hunted? Or had they? Had the Folsom hunters been his remote ancestors, as the pre-Celt and Beaker Trader Ashe mentioned been the other’s forefathers? He only knew that he had experienced a sudden thrust of excitement that lingered. He longed to see that world his own age knew only by the dim and often contradictory evidence of rocks, a handful of flint points, broken bones, the ancient smears of vanished cooking fires.

“My people were hunters—long after yours followed another way of life,” he said, making the best answer he could.

“Right.” Ashe’s told held a note of satisfaction. “Now—just reach me that rod.” He went back to the job at hand and Travis settled down as his somewhat bewildered assistant. The Apache knew that he had made the choice Kelgarries wanted—that he was going to be a part of this whole incredible adventure.

The one thing he was sure of during the next two crowded days was that they were indeed working under pressure and against deadlines. Whether the unexplained threat which seemed to overhang the whole project came from outside the country or from fear of a policy change here at home, no one bothered to make clear. But Travis was willing to let it go at that. It was far more interesting and absorbing to work with Ross Murdock. They set the proper kind of shafts to the pseudo-Folsom spear points and then experimented with the spear thrower. This made the efficient weapons they finally turned out twice as powerful. A seven-foot javelin could be hurled a good hundred and fifty yards or more by the use of that two-foot shaft of the thrower. Travis knew that in close infighting it would add tremendous thrusting power. No wonder a party of hunters so armed dared to go against mammoth and other giant mammals of the period.

In addition to the spears they had flint knives, the counterparts of those found in the debris of Folsom camp sites across most of western America. Travis did not know why he was so sure that he was actually going to use knife and spears and play the role of a wandering prehistoric hunter. Still, he was sure. He learned from Ross that the rest of the time agents’ equipment would not be assembled at the base until the experts had taped film reports out of the past to use as samples.

On the third day Kelgarries and Ashe took a three-man expedition out of the canyon in one ’copter loaded to its limit. They were gone almost a week, and upon their return they hurriedly sent off tapes.

Ashe joined Travis and Ross that same night. He lay down beside their fire with a sigh of weary pleasure.

“Hit pay dirt?” Ross wanted to know.

His chief nodded. There were dark smudges under his eyes and a fine, drawn look to his features. “The wreck is there, all right. And we located hunters on the fringe of the territory. But I think we can follow Plan One. The tribe is small and there doesn’t appear to be more than one. Our guess that the district was thinly populated must be correct. It won’t be necessary to really establish our scouts with the tribe—just let them keep track of wandering hunters.”

“And the transfer?”

Ashe glanced at the watch on his wrist. “Harvey and Logwood are assembling the new one. I give them about forty-eight hours. Headquarters will fly in the extra power packs tonight. Then our men go through. We haven’t the time to spend on finer points now. A working crew follows as soon as the scouts give the ‘all clear.’ H.Q. is analyzing the film reports. They’ll have the rest of the equipment to us as soon as possible.”

Travis stirred. Who was going to be part of that scouting team into the far past? He wanted to ask that—to hope that he might be one. But what had happened a year ago to smash other plans, kept him tongue-tied now. Ross voiced that all-important question.

“Who makes the first jump, chief?”

“You—me—we’re on the spot. Our friend here, if he wants to.”

“You mean that?” Travis asked slowly.

Ashe reached for the waiting coffeepot. “Fox, as long as you don’t go loping off on your own to test that flint-tipped armory you’ve been constructing on the first available mammoth, you can come along. Mainly because you look the part, or will when we get through with you. And maybe you can adapt better than we can. Briefing for a time run used to take weeks. Ask Ross here; he can tell you what a cram course in our work is like. But today we haven’t weeks to spare. We’ve only days and they grow fewer with each sunrise. So we’re gambling on you, on Ross, on me. But get this—I’m your section leader, the orders come from me. And the main rule is—the job comes first! We keep away from the natives, we don’t get involved in any happenings back there. Our only reason for going through is to make as sure as we can that the technical boys are not going to be disturbed while they work on that wreck. And that may not be an easy job.”

“Why?” Ross asked.

“Because this ship didn’t make as good a landing as the one you saw the Russians stripping. According to the films we took through the peeper, there was a bad smash when it hit dirt. We may have to let it go altogether and track down Number Two on our list. Only, if we can come up with just one good find on board this one, we can stave off the objections of the Committee and get the appropriation for future exploration.”

“Might do to run one of the Committee through,” Ross remarked.

Ashe grinned. “Want to lose your job, boy? Give ’em a good look around in some of the spots we’ve prospected and they’d turn up their toes—quick.”

Just three days later a bright shaft of sunlight pierced a small side pocket of the canyon to spotlight the three as they worked under the critical eyes of a small, neat man. He regarded them intently through the upper half of his bifocals and made terse suggestions in a dry, precise voice. Stripping, they meticulously rubbed their skins with the cream their instructor had provided. That treatment turned their tanned, or naturally dark, skins into the leathery uniform brownness of men who wore very little clothing in any kind of weather.

Ashe and Ross had been provided with contact lenses so that their eyes were now as dark brown as Travis’. And their closely cropped hair was hidden under wigs of straggling, coarse black locks which fell shoulder-length at the sides and descended like a pony’s mane between their shoulder blades.

Then each took his turn flat on his back while the make-up artist, working from film charts, proceeded to supply his victims with elaborate patterns of simulated tattoos on chests, upper arms, chins, and upper cheekbones. Travis, undergoing the process, studied Ashe, who now represented the finished product. Had he not seen all the steps in that transformation, he would not have guessed that under that savage exterior now existed Dr. Gordon Ashe.

“Glad we’re allowed sandals,” the same savage commented as he tightened the thongs which held about him a loincloth-kilt of crudely dressed hide.

Ross had just thrust his bare feet into a pair of such primitive footwear. “Let’s hope they’ll stay on if we have to scramble, chief,” he said, eyeing them dubiously.

Finished at last, the three stood in line to be checked by the make-up man and Kelgarries. The Major carried some furred skins over his arm, and now he tossed one to each of the disguised men.

“Better hold on to those. It gets cold where you’re going. All right—the ’copter’s waiting.”

Travis slung a hide pouch over his shoulder and gathered up the three spears he had headed with pseudo-Folsom points. All the men were armed with the same weapons and there was a supply bag for each man.

The ’copter took them up and out, swinging away from the Canyon of the Hohokam into a wide sweep of desert land, bringing them down again before a carefully camouflaged installation. Kelgarries gave Ashe his last instructions.

“Take a day—two if you have to. Make a circle about five miles out, if you can. The rest is up to you.”

Ashe nodded. “Can do. We’ll signal in as soon as we can give an ‘all clear.’”

The concealed structure housed a pile of material and an inner compartment of four walls, one floor, no roof. Together the three agents crowded into it. They watched the panel slide shut behind them while radiance streamed around their bodies. Travis felt a tingling through bone and muscle, and then a stab of panic as the breath was squeezed from his lungs by a weird wrenching that twisted his insides. But he kept his feet, held on to his spears. There was a second or two of blackness. Then once again he gulped air, shook himself as he might have done climbing out of a strong river current. Ross’s dot-bordered lips curved in a smile and he signaled “thumbs up” with his scarred hand.

“End of run—here we go . . .”

As far as Travis could see they were still in the box. But when Ashe pushed open the door panel, the stacked boxes which had lain there before had been replaced by an untidy heap of rocks. And clambering over those in the wake of his companions, the Apache did find a very strange world before him.

Gone was the desert with its burden of sun-heated rock. A plain of coarse grass, thigh- or even waist-high, rolled away to some hills. And that grassy plain was cut by the end of a lake which stretched northward beyond the horizon. Travis saw brush and clumps of small trees. Although too distant for him to distinguish their species, he could make out slowly moving lumps which had to be grazing animals.

There was a sun overhead, but an icy wind lashed Travis’ three-quarters-bare body. He pulled the hide robe about his shoulders, and saw that his companions had copied that move. The air was not only chilly, it was dank with a wealth of moisture. And each puff of breeze carried new, rank smells, which his nostrils could not identify. This world was as harsh and grim as his own, but in an entirely different fashion.

Ashe stooped and rolled aside one of the nearby rocks to disclose a small box. From his supply bag he produced three small buttons and gave one to each of the younger men.

“Plant that in your left ear,” he ordered, and did so with his own. Then he pushed a key on the side of the box. A low chirruping sound was instantly audible. “This is our homing signal. It acts as radar to bring you back here.”

“What’s that?”

A plume of wind-whipped smoke bannered to the north. Travis could not believe that the long trail of grayish vapor marked a forest fire, yet it surely signalized a conflagration of some size.

Ashe glanced up casually. “Volcano,” he returned. “This part of the world hasn’t settled down yet. We head northwest, around the lake tip, and we should strike the wreck.” He started off at a steady lope which told Travis that this was not the first time the time agent had played the role of primitive hunter.

The grass brushed against them, leaving drops of cold moisture on their bare legs and thighs. Travis concluded that there must have been rain just before their arrival. And from the look of the massing clouds to the east, a second storm might catch them soon.

As they came away from the hill marking the time transfer, the chirruping in his ear grew fainter, varying in intensity as Ashe twisted and turned about the hooked end of the lake. The wide reach of lush grass continued. This was truly game country although they had not yet passed close enough to any of the grazers to identify them.

About a half mile from the curving shore of the lake rested an object that Nature never made. Half a globe of metallic material had been rammed into the ground. Two jagged rents gaped in its side. The blackened earth around it bore random clumps of new grass. But what impressed Travis chiefly was the object’s size. He deduced that only half of the thing was visible—if its form had originally been a true globe. Yet that half now above the earth was at least six stories tall. The complete vessel must have been a veritable monster, far larger than the largest aircraft of his own time.

“She certainly got it!” observed Ross. “Bad crack up at landing—”

“Or else she had it before landing.” Ashe leaned on a spear to survey the hulk.

“What—?”

“Those holes might have been caused by shell fire. We’ll leave that to the experts to determine. This could be a wreck from a space battle. But look! That storm’s coming fast. I say we’d better circle west ahead of it and find some shelter in the hills. If the first reports are correct, we’ll be caught in a rain worse than we’ve ever known!”

Ashe’s lope lengthened into a trot, and the trot into a run. He was heading away from the wrecked ship to the distant hills. To reach them they had to round the narrow end of the lake.

They were carefully threading their way through a marshy spot when a scream halted them. Travis knew that it was a death cry, but the sound ahead was followed by a yowling squall which could come from no throat, animal or human, of his own time. The squall was answered in turn by grunts that might have issued from the deep chest of a grand pig. And that grunting was echoed on a higher note almost directly behind them!

“Down!” Obeying the order from Ashe, Travis threw himself flat on the muddy ground, wriggling to the left. A moment later all three scouts huddled in a growth of tough brush. They paid no attention to the bramble scratches on their arms and shoulders, for they had front-row seats on a wild drama which held them enthralled.

Crumpled on the ground was a mound of heaving flesh. It was plainly in the death throes for its long, shaggy yellow hair was sodden with blood. Crouched at bay behind that body was another animal. Travis identified it when he caught sight of those long, curved fangs: sabertooth. It was slightly shorter than a lion of Travis’ own day, and its muscular legs and powerful shoulders had the power to daunt a larger beast. But now it was facing a giant . . .

The opponent, whose cub had been killed, was a mountain of flesh, rearing almost eighteen feet above the ground. Balanced on large-boned hind feet and thick tail, it confronted the sabertooth with powerful forearms, each tipped with a gigantic single claw. As the narrow head twisted and turned above the slender forebody, its thick brown hair rippled constantly.

A rank animal smell was blown to the men in the brush as a second monstrous ground sloth moved in to give battle. And the sabertooth spat like the enraged cat it was.

A hand closed on Travis’ arm, jerking his attention from the shaping battle. Ashe pointed westward and pulled again. Ross was already creeping in that direction. The wind was at their back so that they caught the fetor of the beasts without danger of being scented by them in turn.

“Get to it!” Ashe ordered. “We don’t want that cat on our trail. It can’t take on two adult sloths and it’ll be one mighty disappointed diner—out looking for another meal pretty quick.”

They wormed their way forward, trying to gauge from the squalls of the cat and the grunting of the sloths whether battle had yet reached the stage of actual blows. If the cat was smart, Travis thought it would let itself be driven off. And knowing the tactics of mountain lions of his southwest, he believed that was what would happen.

“Okay—run!” Ashe scrambled to his feet and set a good pace across the open lands, the other two thudding behind him. The sun had completely disappeared now, and the grayness under those lowering clouds approached twilight. The thin chirrup of their homing device sounded very lonely and far away.

Brown-gray lumps swung up heads with wide stretches of horns. Save that those horns were straight and not curved, the animals might have been the bison of the historic plains. Catching the scent of the scouts, they tossed those horned heads and set off northward across the open land at a lumbering gallop. Large-headed horses with spectacularly striped coats ran among them with more speed, and far more grace. This was plainly a hunter’s paradise.

The rain raced behind the men, making a visible curtain of water. When that enfolded them, Travis gasped, choked and fought for breath under the pounding flood. But his legs kept the striding pace Ashe had set, and the three continued to head for the hills which were now scarcely visible through the downpour.

A rising slope slowed them, and twice they had to leap runnels of streams carrying water from the heights above them. A vicious crack of lightning lit up the scene. A hand pulled Travis to the left, and so into partial shelter from the storm.

He crowded together with Ashe and Ross, half crouching in the lee of some rocks. It was not quite a cave, but the crevice was better than the open slope.

“How long will this last?” Ross growled.

Ashe’s answer offered little hope, “Anywhere from an hour to a couple of days. Let’s hope we’re lucky.”

They squatted, drawing their hide robes about them, pressing together for the warmth of body contact in the midst of that damp cold. Perhaps they dozed, for Travis came alert with a jerk of his head which hurt neck and shoulder. He knew that the rain had stopped, though there was night outside their inadequate shelter. He asked:

“Do we move on?”

But the world outside their hiding place replied with a roar loud enough to split eardrums. Travis, his nails digging into the wooden shaft of his spear, could not stop shuddering after that menacing blast.

“We do if we want to provide a midnight snack for our friend out there,” Ashe commented. “The rain probably spoiled hunting for somebody. Hereabouts we have sabertooth, the Alaskan lion, the cave bear, and a few other assorted carnivores I don’t want to meet without, say, a tank in reserve.”

“Cheery spot,” Ross remarked. “I’d say our playmate upridge hasn’t had much luck tonight. Any chance of his coming down to scoop us out—or try for a taste?”

“If he, she or it does, he’ll get a pawful of spear points,” Ashe replied. “One advantage of this hole, nothing can get in if we’re firm in saying No!”

There was a second roar, from farther away, Travis noted with relief. Whatever meat hunter on the hoof prowled the hills, it would not have followed their trail. The rain must have cleansed their scent from grass and earth. Huddling there, stiff and cold, they managed now and then to change position of arms or legs so that morning would not find them too cramped to move. They remained until the sky did lighten with the first sign of dawn.

Travis crawled out and straightened up painfully. He bit back a stinging word or two, as a below zero morning breeze cut in under the flap of his cloak blanket. He decided that to properly prepare for roaming the Pleistocene world in the garb of its rightful inhabitants, one should practice beforehand by spending a month or so in a deep freeze stripped to one’s shorts. And he was pleased to see that neither Ashe nor Ross was any more agile when he emerged from the hole of refuge.

They mouthed food-concentrate bars from their storage bags. Travis, though knowing the energy-building uses of those small squares, longed for real meat, hot and juicy, straight from the fire. There was no taste to these concentrate things.

“Up we go.” Ashe wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and slung his bag over his shoulder. He studied the way before them to find the best ascent. But Travis had already started, winding in and out between boulders which marked the debris of a landslide.

When the scouts at last reached the summit, they turned back to look into the valley of the lake. That smooth sheet of water occupied perhaps half of the basin. And it seemed to Travis that the mirror surface reached closer to the wrecked ship today than it had when they passed it the afternoon before. He said as much, and Ashe agreed.

“Water has to go somewhere and these rains feed all the streams heading down there. Another reason why we must make this a fast job. So—let’s get moving.”

But when they turned again to follow the line of the heights, Travis halted. Thin, watery sunlight broke through the clouds, carrying with it little or no warmth as yet, but providing more light. And—he peered intently westward and downslope on the other side of the hills . . . No, he had not been mistaken! That sunlight, feeble as it was, was reflecting from some point in the second valley. From water? No, the answering spark was too brilliant.

Ashe and Ross, following his direction, saw it too.

“Second ship?” Ross suggested.

“If so, it is not marked on our charts. But we’ll take a look. I agree that’s too bright to be sun on water.”

Had there been survivors from the other crash? Travis wondered. If so, had they established a camp down there? He had heard enough during the past few days to judge that any contact with the original owners of the galactic ships could be highly dangerous. Ross had been pursued by one of their patrols across miles of wilderness. He had escaped from the mind compulsion they exerted only by deliberately burning his hand in a fire and using pain to counter their mental demand for surrender. They were not human, those ship people. What powers or weapons they possessed were so alien as to defy human understanding so far.

So the three took to cover, making expert use of every bit of brush, every boulder, as they advanced to locate that source of reflection. Again Travis was amazed by the skill of his companions. He had hunted mountain lion, and lion in the beast’s native ground is very wary game. He could read trail with all the skill imparted to him by Chato who knew the ways of the old raiding warriors. But these two were equal to him at what he always considered a red man’s rather than a white man’s game.

They came at last to lie in a fringe of trees, parting the grass cautiously to look out on an expanse of open land. In the middle of it rested another globe-shaped ship. But this one was entirely above ground and it was small, a pygmy compared to the giant in the other valley. At first superficial examination it looked to have been landed normally, not crashed. Halfway up, the curve facing them showed the dark hole of an open entrance port, and from it dangled a ladder. Someone had survived this landing, come to earth here!

“Lifeboat?” Ashe’s voice was the slightest of whispers.

“It is not shaped like the one I saw before,” Ross hissed. “That was like a rocket.”

Wind sang across the clearing. It set the ladder clanging against the side of the globe. From the foot of the strange ship some birds tried to rise. But they moved sluggishly, awkwardly flopping their wings. And the wind brought to the three in hiding a sweetish, stomach-turning odor that could never be mistaken by those who had ever smelled it. Something lay dead there, very dead.

Ashe stood up, watching those birds narrowly. Then he stepped forward. A snarl rose from ground level. Travis’ spear came up. It sang through the air and a brown-coated, four-footed beast yelped, leaped pawing in the air, and crashed back into the grass. More of the gorged carrion birds fluttered and hopped away from their feast.

What lay about the foot of the ladder was not a pretty sight. Nor could the scouts tell at first glance how many bodies there had been. Ashe attempted to make a closer examination and came away, white-faced and gagging. Ross picked up a tatter of blue-green material.

“Baldies’ uniforms, all right.” He identified it. “This is one thing I’ll never forget. What happened here? A fight?”

“What ever it was, it happened some time ago,” Ashe, livid under tan and skin stain, got out the words carefully. “Since there was no burial, I’d say the crew must all have been finished.”

“Do we go in?” Travis laid a hand on the ladder.

“Yes. But don’t touch anything. Especially any of the instruments or installations.”

Ross laughed on a slightly hysterical high note. “That you do not need to underline for me, chief. After you, sir, after you.”

Thus, Ashe leading the way, they climbed the ladder and entered the gaping hole of the port. There was a second door a short distance inside, doubly thick and reinforced with heavy braces. But it, too, was ajar. Ashe pushed it back and then they were in a well from which another ladder-like stair arose.

Somehow Travis had expected darkness, since there were no windows or wall openings in the outer skin of the globe. But a blue light seeped from the walls about them, and not only light, but a comforting warmth.

“The ship’s still alive,” Ross commented. “And if she is intact—”

“Then,” Ashe finished softly for him, “we’ve made the big find, boys. We never hoped for luck like this.” He started to climb the inner ladder.

They came to a landing, or rather a platform from which opened three oval doors, all closed. Ross pushed against each, but they all held.

“Locked?” Travis asked.

“Might be—or else we don’t know how to turn the right buttons. Going on up, chief? If this follows the pattern of that other one, the control cabin is on top.”

“We’ll take a look. But no experiments, remember?”

Ross stroked his scarred hand. “I’m not forgetting that.”

A second ladder section brought them through a manhole in the floor of a hemisphere chamber occupying the whole top of the ship. And, before they were through that entrance, they knew that death had come that way before them.

There was only one body, crumpled forward against the straps of a seat which hung on springs and cords from the roof. The rigid corpse, clad in the blue-green material, had slumped toward a board crowded with dials, buttons, levers.

“Pilot—died at his post.” Ashe walked forward, stooped over the body. “I don’t see any sign of a wound. Could be an epidemic which attacked the whole crew. We’ll let the doctors figure it out.”

They did not linger to explore farther, for this find was too important. It was too necessary that the news of this second ship be relayed to Kelgarries and his superiors. But Ashe took the precaution of drawing the ladder into the globe’s port after his two younger companions had descended. He made his way down by rope.

“Who do you think is going to snoop?” Ross wanted to know.

“Just a little insurance. We know there are primitives in the northern end of this country. They may be the type to whom everything strange is taboo. Or they may be inquisitive enough to explore. And I don’t fancy someone touching off a com again and calling in the galactic patrol or whoever those chaps wearing blue are. Now, let’s get to the transfer on the double!”

The weak sunlight of the early morning had increased in strength. The air was growing noticeably warmer, and danker, too, as the moisture-laden grass about them gave up its burden of last night’s rain. Travel resembled running through a river choked with slimy, slapping reeds, save that the ground underfoot was firm. The men panted up the heights and down past their refuge of the stormy night to the plain of the lake. They skirted the glade where scavengers were busy with the remains of the sabertooth’s kill.

As they came out into the open Ashe broke stride and swept one hand down in an emphatic order to take cover. That mixed herd of bison and horses which they had startled the night before was in movement once more, cutting diagonally across their path. And the animals were plainly fleeing some menace. Sabertooth again? The huge bison appeared able to take care of themselves with those sweeping horns.

Only when the wind bore to Travis high, far-off sounds which his ears translated into human shouts did he understand that the hunters were out in force. The primitive tribesmen had stampeded the herd in order to cut down the weaker stragglers.

The scouts were pinned down, as an ever-thickening stream of animals cut across the road they must take in order to reach the time transport. Before they had attained their present position, the main body of the herd had caught up, headed by the fleeter horses that whirled ahead of the heavier bison. Now the men caught sight of other harriers, using the general disturbance to their own advantage. Five dark shapes broke cover a hundred yards or so away. They wove in to cut around a lumbering, half-grown calf on the edge of the bison herd.

“Dire wolves,” Ashe identified.

They were stocky, large-headed animals, running without giving tongue, but clearly familiar with this game. Two darted in to snap at the calf’s head, while the others rushed in for a crippling tendon slash at the hind legs which would make the bison easy prey.

“Oooooo-yahhh!”

That small drama so near to them had absorbed Travis almost to the point of his forgetting what must lie beyond. There was no chance yet of sighting those who called and made the stragglers their targets. But at that moment a horse staggered on past the bison being attacked by the wolves. Its large head had sunk close to knee level and a rope of bloody foam hung from muzzle to trampled grass. Driven deeply into its barrel was a spear. And even as the animal came fully into view it tried to lift its head, faltered, and crashed to earth.

One of the wolves straightway turned attention to this new prey. It trotted away from the battle with the calf to sniff inquiringly at the still-breathing horse. With a growl, it launched itself at the animal’s throat. The wolf was feeding when the hunter of that kill retaliated for his brazen theft.

Another spear, lighter, but as deadly and well aimed, sped through the air, caught the dire wolf behind the right shoulder. The wolf gave a convulsive leap and collapsed just beyond the body of the horse. At the same time other spears flashed, bringing down its pack mates and, last of all, the young bison they had been worrying.

Most of the fleeing herd had passed by now. There were other animals lying on the flattened grass of the back trail. The three scouts crouched low, unable to withdraw lest they attract the notice of the hunters now coming in to collect their booty.

There were twenty or more males, medium-sized brown-skinned men with ragged heads of black hair like the wigs provided the scouts. Their clothing consisted of the same hide loincloth-kilts fastened about their sweating bodies with string belts and lacings of thongs. Studying them, Travis could see how well their own make-up matched the general appearance of the Folsom hunters.

Behind the men trudged the women and children, stopping to butcher the kill. They outnumbered the hunters. Whether those they saw represented the full strength of a small tribe, there was no telling. The men shouted to each other hoarsely, and the two who had accounted for the wolves seemed especially pleased. One of them squatted on his heels, pried open the mouth of the wolf which had killed the horse, and inspected its fangs with a critical eye. Since a necklace of just such trophies strung on a thong thumped across his broad chest with every movement of his body, it was plain he was considering a new addition to his adornment.

Ashe’s hand fell on Travis’ shoulder. “Back,” he breathed into the Apache’s ear. They retreated, wriggling out of the grass into the edge of the morass at the end of the lake. Flies and other stinging insects avidly attacked their muck-covered bodies. They moved away from the scene of the hunt with every bit of stalker’s skill they possessed, glad there was a wealth of meat to occupy the tribesmen.

Clumps of willow-like trees thickened enough to provide cover, allowing them to run in a crouch until Ashe dived panting into a convenient brush pile. With hot pain stabbing him at every breath, Travis threw himself down beside Ashe and Ross collapsed between them.

“That was nearly it,” Ross got out between rasping intakes of air. “Never a dull moment in this business . . .”

Travis raised his head from his bent arm and tried to locate landmarks. They had been headed for the concealed time transport when the hunt cut across their path. But they had had to swing north to avoid the butchering parties. So their goal must now lie southeast.

Ashe was on his knees, peering northward to where the bulk of the wrecked ship was embedded in the plain.

“Look!”

They drew up beside him to watch a party of the hunters patter around the wreckage. One of them raised a spear and clanged it against the side of the spaceship.

“They didn’t avoid it.” Travis got the significance of the casual assault.

“Which means—we’ll have to move fast with the smaller one! If they discover it, they may try to explore. Time’s growing shorter.”

“Only open country between us and the transfer now.” Travis pointed out the obvious. To cut directly across to that cluster of masking rocks would put them in the open, to be instantly sighted by any tribesman looking in the right direction.

Ashe gazed at him thoughtfully. “Do you think you could make it without being spotted?”

Travis measured distances, tried to pick out any scrap of cover lying along the shortest route. “I can try,” was all he could say.

He made for the rise at the southern point of the pile of rocks masking the installation. A brindled shape slunk out of his path, showing fangs. The dire wolf trotted on to the nearest carcass, where the women had stripped only the choicest meat, to seek food for which it would not have to fight.

Travis worked his way along the foot of the rise. The main path of the stampede was to the west and he believed himself in the clear, when snorting exploded before him. A bulk heaved through small bushes and he found himself confronting a bison cow. A broken spear shaft protruded too high on her shoulder to cause a disabling wound. And the pain had enraged her to a dangerous state.

In such a situation even a range cow would be perilous for a man on foot, and the bison was a third again larger than the animals he knew. Only the bushes around them saved Travis from death at that first meeting. The cow bellowed and charged, bearing down on him at a speed which he would have thought impossible for her weight. He hurled himself to the left in a wild scramble to escape and landed in a thorny tangle. The cow, meanwhile, burst past him close enough for her coarse hair to rasp against one outflung arm.

Travis’ head rang with the sound of her bellowing as he squirmed around in the bush to bring up his heaviest spear. The cow had skidded to a stop, gouged matted grass and turf with her hoofs as she wheeled. Then the spear haft in her shoulder caught in one of the springy half-trees. She bellowed again, lurching forward to fight that drag. The broken spear ripped loose and a great gout of blood broke, to be sopped up in the heavy tangle of shoulder hair.

That slowed her. Travis had time to get on his feet, ready his spear. There was no good target in that wide head confronting him. He jerked off his supply bag, swung it by its carrying thong, and flung it at the cow’s dripping muzzle. His trick worked. The bison charged, not for him, but after the thing that had teased her. And Travis thrust home behind her shoulder with all the force he had.

The weight of the bison and the impetus of the animal’s charge tore the shaft from his hold. Then the cow went to her knees, coughing, and the big body rolled on one side. He hurdled the mount of her hindquarters, fearing that the noise of battle might attract the hunters.

Forcing a way through the brush, he made most of the remainder of his journey on hands and knees. At last he crouched in the shelter of the rock pile, his ribs heaving, careless of the bleeding scratches which laced his exposed flesh.

With his body pressed to earth, Travis scanned his back trail and saw that he had been wise to leave the scene of battle quickly. Three of the hunters were running across the plain toward the brush, trailing spears. But they showed caution enough to suggest that this was not the first time they had had to deal with wounded stragglers from a stampeded herd.

Having scouted the brush, the brown men ventured into its cover. And seconds later a surprised shout informed Travis his kill had been located. Then that shout was answered by a long eerie wail from some point up the hill above the rocks. Travis stirred uneasily.

The spear he had been forced to leave in the body of the cow resembled their own—but did it look enough like theirs for them to believe the kill had been made by a tribesman? Had these people some system of individual markings for personal weapons, such as his own race had developed in their roving days? Would they try to track him down?

He snaked his way into the crevice of the rocks. The alerting signal was there, a second box set in beside the radar guide which now hummed its signal in his ear. He plunged down the lever set in its lid, then moved the tiny bit of metal rapidly up and down in the pattern he had been drilled on only the day before. In the desert of the twenty-first century that call would register on another recording device, relaying to Kelgarries the need for a hasty conference.

Travis edged out from the rocks and looked about him warily. He flattened against a boulder taller than his wiry body and listened, not only with his ears but with every wilderness-trained sense he possessed. His flint knife was in his fist as he caught that click of warning. And his other hand went out to grab at an upraised forearm as brown and well muscled as his own. The smell of blood and grease hit his nostrils as they came together chest to chest, and the stranger spat a torrent of unintelligible words at him. Travis brought up the fist with the knife, not to stab the other’s flesh, but in a sharp blow against a thick jawbone. It rocked the shaggy black head back for a moment.

Pain scored along Travis’ own ribs as the two men broke apart. He aimed another blow at the jaw, brought up his knee as the native sprang in, knife ready. It was dirty fighting by civilized rules, but Travis wanted a quick knockout with no knife work. He staggered the hunter, and was going in for a last telling blow when another figure darted around the rocks and hit the back of the tribesman’s head, sending him limp and unconscious to the ground.

Ross Murdock wasted no time in explanations. “Come on. Help me get him under cover!”

Somehow they crowded into the shelter of the transfer, the Folsom man between them. With quick efficiency, Ross tied the wrists and ankles of their captive and inserted a strip of hide for a gag between his slack jaws.

Travis inspected a dripping cut across his own ribs and decided it was relatively unimportant. He faced about as Ashe joined them.

“Looks as if you’ve been elected target for today.” Ashe pushed aside Travis’ hands to inspect the cut critically. “You’ll live,” he added, as he rummaged in his supply bag for a small box of pills. One he crushed on his palm, to smear the resulting powder along the bloody scratch, the other he ordered his patient to swallow. “What did you do to touch this off?”

Travis sketched his adventure with the bison cow.

Ashe shrugged. “Just one of those unlucky foul-ups we have to expect now and then. Now we have this fellow to worry about.” He surveyed the captive bleakly.

“What do we do?” Ross’s nose wrinkled. “Start a zoo with this exhibit one?”

“You got the message through?” Ashe asked.

Travis nodded.

“Then we’ll sit it out. As soon as it gets dark we’ll carry him out, cut the cords, and leave him near one of their camps. That’s the best we can do. Unfortunately the tribe seems to be heading west—”

“West!” Travis thought of that other ship.

“What if they try to board that spacer?” Ross seemed to share his concern. “I’ve a feeling this isn’t going to be a lucky run. We’ve had trouble breathing down our necks right from the start. But we should keep watch on that other ship—”

“And what could we do to prevent their exploring it?” Travis wanted to know. He was feeling low, willing to agree with any forebodings.

“We’ll hope that they will follow the herd,” Ashe answered. “Food is a major preoccupation with such a tribe and they’ll keep near to a good supply as long as they can. But it does make sense to watch the ship. I’ll have to wait here to report to Kelgarries. Suppose you two take our friend here for his walk and then keep on going to that ridge between the valleys. Then you can let us know in time to keep our men under cover if the tribe drifts that way.”

Ross sighed. “All right, chief. When do we start?”

“At dusk. No use courting trouble. There will be prowlers out there after nightfall.”

“Prowlers!” Ross grinned without much humor. “That’s a mild way of putting it. I don’t intend to meet up with any eleven-foot lion in the dark!”

“Moon tonight,” corrected Travis mildly, and settled himself for what rest he could get before they ventured to leave.

Not only the moon gave light that night. The dusky sky was riven by the sullen fire of the distant volcano—or volcanoes. Travis now believed that there was more than one burning mountain to the north. And the air had a distinct metallic taste, which Ashe ascribed to an active eruption miles away.

Somehow, between them they got their captive on his feet and marched him along. He seemed to be in a dazed state, slumping again to the ground while Travis went ahead to scout out a group about a fire.

The Folsom men—and women—were gorging on meat lightly seared by the fire. The odor of it reached Travis and filled him with an urge to dart into that company and seize a sizzling rib or two for himself. Concentrates might provide the scientific balance of energy and nourishment which his body needed, but they were no substitute, as far as he was concerned, for the contents of the feast he was watching.

Fearing to linger lest his appetite overpower his caution, he flitted back to Ross and reported that there were no sentries out to spoil their simple plan. So they hauled their charge to the edge of the firelight, removed his bonds and gag, and gave him a light push. Then they quickly raced out of range.

If any natives did follow, they did not find the right trail, and the two made the ridge without further bad luck.

“We’re the stupid ones,” Ross observed as they drew up the last incline and found a reasonably sheltered spot under an overhang. It was not quite a cave, but had only one open side to defend. “Nobody in his right senses is going to gallop around in the dark.”

“Dark?” protested Travis, clasping his arms about the knees pulled tightly to his chest, and staring northward. His suspicion about the volcanic activity there was borne out now by the redness of the sky and the presence of fumes in the wind. It was a spectacular display, but not one to instill confidence. His only satisfaction lay in the miles which must stretch between that angry mountain and the ridge on which he was now stationed.

Ross made no answer. Since Travis had the first watch, his companion had rolled in his hide cloak and was already asleep.

It was a night of broken sleep. When Travis rose in the dawn he discovered a thin skim of gray dust on his skin and the surrounding rocks. At the same time a sulphuric blast made him cough raggedly.

“Anything doing?” he croaked.

Ross shook his head and offered the gourd water bottle. The small spaceship rested peacefully below. The only change in the picture from the previous day was that there was less activity among the scavengers below the open port.

“What are they like—those men from space?” Travis asked suddenly.

To his surprise Ross, whom he had come to regard as close to nerveless, shivered.

“Pure poison, fella, and don’t you ever forget it! I saw two kinds—the baldies who wear the blue suits, and a furry-faced one with pointed ears. They may look like men—but they aren’t. And believe me, anyone who tangles with those boys in blue is asking to be chopped up like hamburger!”

“I wonder where they came from.” Travis raised his head. The few stars were dim pinpoints of light in the dawn sky. To think of those as suns nourishing other worlds such as the solid earth now under him—where men, or at least thinking creatures, carried on lives of their own—was a huge leap of imagination.

Ross waved a hand skyward. “Take your pick, Fox. The big brains running this show of ours believe there was a whole confederation of different worlds tied together in a United Something-or-other then—” He blinked and laughed. “Me—saying ‘then’ when I mean ‘now!’ This jumping back and forth in time mixes a guy’s thinking.”

“And if someone were to take off in that ship down there, he’d run into them outside?”

“If he did, he’d regret it!”

“But if he took off in our time—would he still find them waiting?”

Ross played with the thongs fastening the supply bag. “That’s one of the big questions. And nobody’ll have the right answer until we do go and see. Twelve-fifteen thousand years is a long time. Do you know any civilization here that’s lasted even a fraction of that? From painted hunters to the atom here. Out there it could be the atom back to painted hunters—or to nothing—by now.”

“Would you like to go and see?”

Ross smiled. “I’ve had one brush with the blue boys. If I could be sure they weren’t still on some star map, I might say yes. I wouldn’t care to meet them on their home ground—and I’m no trained space man. But the idea does eat into a fella . . . Ha—company!”

There was movement down in the valley—to the north. But what were issuing from the woods at a leisurely and ponderous pace were not Folsom hunters. Ross whistled very softly between his teeth, watching that advance eagerly, and Travis shared his excitement.

The bison herd, the striped horses, the frustrated sabertooth confronting the giant ground sloths, none had been as thrilling a sight as this. Even the elephant of their own time could generate a measure of awe in the human onlooker by the sheer majesty of its movement. And these larger and earlier members of the same tribe produced an almost paralyzing sense of wonder in the two scouts. “Mammoths!”

Tall, thick-haired giants, their backbones sloping from the huge dome of the skull to the shorter hindquarters, dwarfed tree and landscape as they moved. Three of them towered close to fourteen feet at the shoulder. They bore the weight of the tremendous curled tusks proudly, their trunks swaying in time to their unhurried steps. They were the most formidable living things Travis had ever seen. And, watching them, he could not believe that the hunters he had spied upon in the other valley had ever brought down such game with spears. Yet the evidence that they had, had been discovered over and over again—scattered bones with a flint point between the giant ribs or splitting a massive spine.

“One—two—three—” Ross was counting, half under his breath. “And a small one—”

“Calf,” Travis identified. But even that baby was nothing to face without a modern weapon to hand.

“Four—five—Family party?” Ross speculated.

“Maybe. Or do they travel in herds?”

“Ask the big brains. Ohhh—look at that tree go!”

The leader in the dignified parade set its massive head against a tree bole, gave a small push, and the tree crashed. With a squeal audible to the scouts, the mammoth calf hustled forward and began busily harvesting the leaves, while its elders appeared to watch it with adult indulgence.

Ross pushed the wind-blown tails of wig hair out of his eyes. “We may have a problem here. What if they don’t move on? I can’t see a crew working down there with those tons of tusks skipping about in the background.”

“If you want to haze ’em on,” Travis observed, “don’t let me stop you. I’ve drag-herded stubborn cows—but I’m not going down there and swing a rope at any of those rumps!”

“They might take a fancy to bump over the ship.”

“So they might,” agreed Travis. “And what could we do to stop ’em?”

But for the moment the mammoth family seemed content at their own end of the valley, which was at least a quarter of a mile from the ship. After an hour’s watch Ross tightened the thongs of his sandals and gathered up his spears.

“I’ll report in. Maybe those walking mountains will keep hunters away—”

“Or draw them here,” corrected Travis pessimistically. “Think you can find your way back?”

Ross grinned. “The trail is getting to be a regular freeway. All we need is a traffic cop or two. Be seeing you . . .” He disappeared from their perch with that uncanny ability to vanish silently into the surrounding landscape that Travis still found unusual in a white man.

As Travis continued to lie there, chin supported on forearm, idly watching the mammoths, he tried again to figure out what made Ashe and Ross Murdock so different from the other members of their race that he knew. Of course he had in a measure felt the same lack of self-consciousness with Dr. Morgan. To Prentiss Morgan a man’s race and the color of his skin were nothing—a shared enthusiasm was all that really mattered. Morgan had cracked Travis Fox’s shell and let him into a larger world. And then—like all soft creatures—he had been the more deeply hurt when that new world had turned hostile. He had then fled back into the old, leaving everything—even friendship behind.

Now he waited for that smoldering flame of past anger to bite. It was there, but dulled, just as the night fire of the volcano was now only a lazy smoke plume under the rising sun. The desert over which he had ridden to find water a week ago was indeed buried in time. What—?

The mammoths had moved, with the largest bull facing about. Trunk up, the beast shrilled a challenge that tore at Travis’ ears. This was beyond the squall of the sabertooth, the grunting roar of a sloth prepared to do battle. It was the most frightening sound he had ever heard.

A second time the bull trumpeted. Sabertooth on the hunt? The Alaskan lion? What animal was large enough, or desperate enough, to stalk that walking mountain? Man?

But if there was a Folsom hunter in hiding, he did not linger. The bull paced along the edge of the wood and then butted over another tree, to tear loose leafy branches and crunch them greedily. The crisis was past.

An hour later a party guided by Ross climbed up to join him. Kelgarries and four others wearing camouflage coveralls, spread themselves on the ground to share the lookout.

“That’s our baby!” The major’s face was alight with enthusiasm as he sighted the derelict. “What can you do about her, boys?”

But one of the crew focused glasses in another direction. “Hey—those things are mammoths!” he shouted. As one, his fellows turned to follow his pointing finger.

“Sure,” snapped the major. “Look at the ship, Wilson. If she is intact, can we possibly swing a direct transfer?”

Reluctantly the other man abandoned the mammoth family for business. He studied the derelict through his lenses. “Some job. Biggest transfer we ever did was the sub frame—”

“I know that! But that was two years ago, and Crawford’s experiments have proved that the grid can be expanded without losing power. If we can take this one straight through without any dismantling, we’ve put the schedule ahead maybe five years! And you know what that will mean.”

“And who’s going to go down there to set up a grid with those outsize elephants watching him? We have to have a clear field to work in and no interruptions. A lot of the material won’t stand any rough handling.”

“Yeah,” echoed one of the subordinates. Again the lenses swung to the north. “Just how are you going to shoo the mammoths out?”

“Scout job, I suppose.” That resigned comment came from Ashe as he joined the party. “Well, I’m admitting right here and now that I have no ideas, bright or otherwise, on how to make a mammoth decide to take a long walk. But we’re open for suggestions.”

They watched the browsing beasts in silence. Nobody volunteered any ideas. It appeared that this particular problem was not yet covered by any rule on or off the book.

“What we need is a mine field—like the one planted around Headquarters,” Ross said at last.

“Mine field?” repeated the man Kelgarries had called Wilson. Then he said again, “Mine field!”

“Got something?” demanded the major.

“Not a mine field,” Wilson corrected. “We could fix it for those brutes to blow themselves up, all right, but they’d take the ship with them. However, a sonic barrier now—”

“Run it around the ship outside your work field—yes!” The major was eager again. “Would it take long to get it in?”

“We’d have to bring a lot of equipment through. Say a day—maybe more. But it is the only thing I can think of now which might work.”

“All right. You’ll get all the material you need—on the double!” promised Kelgarries.

Wilson chuckled. “Just like that, eh? No howls about expense? Remember, I’m not going to sign any orders I have to defend with my lifeblood about two years from now before some half-baked investigating committee.”

“If we pull this off,” Kelgarries returned with convincing force, “we’ll never have to defend anything before anyone! Man—you get that ship through intact and our whole project will have paid for itself from the day it was nothing but a few wishful sentences on the back of an old envelope. This is it—the big pay-off!”

That was the beginning of a hectic period in Travis’ life which he was never able to sort out neatly in his head afterward. With Ashe and Ross he patrolled a wide area of hill and valley, keeping watch upon the camps of the wandering hunters, marking down the drifting herds of animals. For two days men shuttled back and forth and then erected a second time transfer within the valley of the smaller ship.

Wilson’s sonic barrier—an invisible yet nerve-shattering wall of high-frequency impulses—was in place around the ship. And while its signals did not affect human ears, the tension it produced did reach any man who strayed into its influence. The mammoth family withdrew into the small woodland from which they had come. The men working on the globe did not know whether that retreat was the result of the vibrations or not—but at least the beasts were gone.

Meanwhile more sonic broadcasters were set up on every path in and out of the valley, sealing it from invasion. Kelgarries and his superiors were throwing every resource of the project into this one job.

About the ship arose a framework of bars as fast as the men could fit one to another. Travis, watching the careful deliberation of the fitting, understood that delicate and demanding work was in progress. He learned from overheard comments that a new type of time transfer was in the process of being assembled here. One so large had never been attempted before. If the job was successful, the globe would be carried intact through to his own era for detailed study.

In the meantime another small crew of experts explored the ship, taking care not to activate any of its machines, and also made a detailed study of the remains of the crew. Medical men did what they could to discover the cause for the mass death of the space men. And their final verdict was a sudden attack of disease or food poisoning, for there were no wounds.

Three days—four—Travis, weary to his very bones, dragged back from a scouting trip southward. He hunched down by the fire in the camp the three field men kept on the heights above the crucial valley. A metallic taste in the air rasped throat and lungs when he breathed deeply. For the past two days volcanic activity in the north had intensified. During the previous night they had all been awakened by a display—luckily miles away—in which half a mountain must have blown skyward. Twice torrents of rain had hit, but it was warm rain and the sultriness of the air made conditions now almost tropical. He would be very glad when that fretwork of bars was in place and they could leave this muggy hotbox.

“See anything?” Ross Murdock tossed aside the hide blanket he had pulled about head and shoulders. He coughed raspingly as one of the sulphur-tinged breezes curled about them.

“Migration—I think,” Travis qualified his report. “The big bison herd is already well south and the hunters are following it.”

“Don’t like the fireworks, I suppose.” Ross nodded to the north. “And I don’t blame them. There’s a forest burning up there today.”

“Seen anything more of the mammoths?”

“Not around here, I was northeast anyway.”

“How long before they’ll be through down there?” Travis went to look down at the ship. There was a murky haze gathering about the valley and it was spoiling the clearness of the view. But men were still aloft on the scaffolding of rods—hurrying to the final capping of the skeleton enclosure around the sphere.

“Ask one of the brains. The other crew—the medics—finished their poking this afternoon. They went through transfer an hour ago. I’d say tomorrow they’ll be ready to throw the switch on that gadget. About time. I have a feeling about this place . . .”

“Maybe rightly.” Ashe loomed out of the growing murk. “There’s trouble popping to the north.” He coughed, and Travis suddenly noted that the mat of wig was missing from the older man’s head. He saw that there was a long red burn mark down Ashe’s shoulder, crossing the white seam of an earlier scar. Ross, seeing it too, jumped to his feet and turned Ashe toward the light of the fire to inspect that burn closer.

“What did you do—try to play boy on the burning deck?” His voice held an undernote of concern.

“I miscalculated how fast a stand of green timber can burn—when conditions are right. The top of a mountain did blow off last night, and it may have an encore soon. We’re moving down nearer to the transfer. And we may have visitors—”

“Hunters? I saw them moving south—”

Ashe shook his head in answer to Travis.

“No, but we may have been too clever about rigging that sonic screen. Those mammoths have been holed up in a small sub-valley to the north. If the hell I’m expecting now breaks loose, sonics won’t hold them back, but breaking through such a barrier will make them really wild. They might just charge straight down through here. Kelgarries will have to try his big transfer if that happens.”

The scouts reached the floor of the valley in time to see the technicians dropping from the grillwork and hurrying to the time transfer. But they had not gotten to the grill when the world went mad. With flame, noise and thunder from the north, a great surge of fire leapt up to scorch the underside of lowering clouds. Travis was thrown off his feet as the ground crawled sickeningly. He saw the grid sway around the globe, heard cries and shouts.

“—quake!” The volcanic outburst was being matched by earthquake. Travis stared up at the grid fascinated, expecting every moment to see the rods fly apart and come crashing down on the dome of the ship. But although the framework swayed, it did not fall.

In the thickening murk Kelgarries drove his men to the personnel transfer. Travis knew that he should join that line, but he was simply too amazed by the scene to stir. The smoke grew denser. Out of it arose a shout in a familiar voice. Getting to his feet, he ran to answer that plea for help.

Ashe lay on the ground. Ross was bending over him, trying to get him to his feet. As Travis blundered up, his spears thrown away, the smoke closed in and provoked strangled coughing. Travis’ sense of direction faltered. Which way was the time transfer? Light ashes drifting through the air blurred air and ground alike. It was like being caught in a snowstorm.

He heard a scream of sheer terror, scaling up. A black shape, bigger than any nightmare, pounded into sight. The mammoths were charging down-valley as Ashe had feared.

“—get out!” Ross pulled Ashe to the right. Now the older man was between them, stumbling dazedly along.

They skirted the wall of rods about the globe and squeezed through to the ball. A mammoth trumpeted behind them. There was little hope now of reaching the personnel transfer in time. Ashe must have realized that. He pulled free of the other two and staggered around the ship, one hand on its surface for guide.

Travis guessed his reason—Ashe wanted to find the ladder which led to the open port, use the ship as a refuge. He heard Ashe call, and slipped behind him to find that the other held the ladder.

Ross gave his officer a boost, then followed after him, while Travis steadied the dangling ladder as best he could. He had started to ascend when he saw Ashe, only a dark blot, claw through the port above. Again he heard a mammoth trumpet and wondered that the beasts had not already smashed into the framework surrounding the ship. Then Travis in turn scrambled through the port, and lay inside gasping and coughing as the irritation carried in the fog bit into his nose and throat.

“Shut it!” Someone shoved Travis roughly away from the door and pushed past him. The outer hatch closed with a clang. Now the fog was only a wisp or two, and utter silence took the place of the bedlam outside.

Travis drew a long breath, one that did not rasp in his throat. The bluish light from the walls of the ship was subdued, but it was bright enough to reveal Ashe. The older man lay half propped against a wall. A bruise was beginning to raise on his forehead, which was no longer covered by any wig. Ross returned from the outer hatch.

“Kind of close quarters here,” he commented. “We might as well spread out some.”

They went out the inner door of the lock. Murdock swung that shut behind them, a move which was to save their lives.

“In here—” Murdock indicated the nearest door. The barriers which had been tightly closed on their first visit to the ship had been opened by the technicians. And the cabin beyond was furnished with a cross between a bunk and a hammock. It was both fastened to the wall and swung on straps from the ceiling. Together they guided Ashe to it and got him down, still dazed. Travis had time for no more than a quick glance about when a voice rang down the well of the stair.

“Hey! Who’s down there? What’s going on?”

They climbed to the control cabin. In front of them stood a wiry young man in technician’s coveralls, who stared at them wide-eyed.

“Who are you?” he demanded, as he backed away raising his fists in defense.

Travis was completely bewildered until he caught sight of a reflection on the shiny control board—a dirty, nearly naked savage. And Ross was his counterpart—the two of them must certainly look like savages to the stranger. Murdock peeled off his ash-encrusted wig, a gesture Travis copied. The technician relaxed.

“You’re time agents.” He made that recognition sound close to an accusation. “What’s going on, anyway?”

“General blowup.” Ross sat down suddenly and heavily in one of the swinging chairs. Travis leaned against the wall. Here in this silent cabin it was difficult to believe in the disaster and confusion outside. “There’s a volcanic eruption in progress,” Murdock continued. “And the mammoths charged—just before we made it in here—”

The technician started for the stairwell. “We’ve got to get to the transfer.”

Travis caught his arm. “No getting out of the ship now. You can’t even see—ash too thick in the air.”

“How close were they to taking this ship through?” Ross wanted to know.

“All ready, as far as I know,” the technician began, and then added quickly, “d’you mean they’ll try to warp her through now—with us inside?”

“It’s a chance, just a chance. If the grid survived the quake and the mammoths.” Ross’s voice thinned. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

“We can see—a little.” The technician stepped to one of the side panels his hand going to a button there.

Ross moved, leaping from his seat in a spring which rivaled a sabertooth’s for quickness. He struck the other, sending him sprawling on the floor. But not before the button was pressed home. A flat screen rose from the board, glowing. Then, over the head of the angry technician who was still on his knees, they beheld swirling ash-filled vapor, as if they were looking through a window into the valley.

“You fool!” Ross stood over the technician, and the menace Travis had seen in him at their first meeting was very much alive. “Don’t touch anything in here!”

“Wise guy, eh?” The technician, his face flushed and hard, was getting up, his fists ready. “I know what I’m doing—”

“Look—out there!” Travis’ cry broke them apart before they tangled.

The fogged picture still held. But there was something else to see there now. Yellow-green lines of light built up, bar by bar, square by square, bright and brutal as lightning. The pattern grew fast, superimposed on the gray of the drifting ash.

“The grid!” The technician broke away from Ross. Grasping the back of one of the swinging seats, he leaned forward eagerly to watch the screen. “They’ve turned the power on. They’re going to try to pull us through!”

The grid continued to glow—to scream with light. They could not watch it now because of its eye-searing brilliance. Then the ship rocked. Another earthquake—or something else? Before Travis could think clearly he was caught up in a fury of sensation for which no name was possible. It was as if his flesh and his mind were at war with each other. He gasped and writhed. The brief discomfort he had felt when he used the personnel transfer was nothing compared to this wrenching. He groped for some stability in a dissolving world.

Now he was on the floor. Above him was the window on the outside. He lifted his head slowly because his body felt as if he had been beaten. But that window display—there was no gray now—no ashes falling as snow. All was blue, bright, metallic blue—a blue he knew and that he wanted above him in safety. He staggered up, one hand stretching toward that promise of blue. But that feeling of instability remained.

“Wait!” The technician’s fingers caught his wrist in a hard, compelling grasp. He dragged Travis away from the screen, tried to push him down in one of the chairs. Ross was beyond, his scarred hand clenched on the edge of a control panel until the seams in the flesh stood out in ugly ridges. Losing that look of cold rage, his expression grew wary.

“What’s going on?” Ross asked harshly.

It was the technician who gave a sharp order. “Get in that seat! Strap down! If it’s what I think, fella—” He shoved Ross back into the nearest chair. The other obeyed tamely as if he had not been at blows with the man only moments earlier.

“We’re through time, aren’t we?” Travis still watched that wonderful, peaceful patch of blue sky.

“Sure—we’re through. Only how long we’re going to stay here . . .” The technician stumbled to the third chair, that in which they had discovered the dead pilot days earlier. He sat down with a suddenness close to collapse.

“What do you mean?” Ross’s eyes narrowed. His dangerous look was coming back.

“Dragging us through by the energy of the grid did something to the engines here. Don’t you feel that vibration, man? I’d say this ship was preparing for a take-off!”

“What?” Travis was half out of his seat. The technician leaned forward and shoved him back into the full embrace of the swinging chair. “Don’t get any bright ideas about a quick scram out of here, boy. Just look!”

Travis followed the other’s pointing finger. The stairwell through which they had climbed to the cabin was now closed.

“Power’s on,” the other continued. “I’d say we’re going out pretty soon.”

“We can’t!” Travis began and then shivered, knowing the futility of that protest even as he shaped it.

“Anything you can do?” Ross asked, his control once more complete.

The technician laughed, choked, and then waved his hand at the array on the control board. “Just what?” he asked grimly. “I know the use of exactly three little buttons here. We never dared experiment with the rest without dismantling all the installations and tracing them through. I can’t stop or start anything. So we’re off to the moon and points up, whether we like it or not.”

“Anything they can do out there?” Travis turned back to that patch of blue. He knew nothing about the machines, even about the science of mechanics. He could only hope that somewhere, somehow, someone would end this horror they faced.

The technician looked at him and then laughed again. “They can clear out in a hurry. If there’s a backwash when we blast off, a lot of good guys may get theirs.”

That vibration, which Travis had sensed on his revival from the strain of the time transport, was growing stronger. It came not only from the walls and floor of the cabin, but seemingly from the very air he was gulping in quick, shallow breaths. The panic of utter helplessness sickened him, dried his mouth and gripped his middle with twisting pain.

“How long—?” he heard Ross ask, and saw the technician shake his head.

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“But why? How?” Travis asked hoarsely.

“That pilot, the one they found sitting here . . .” The technician rapped the edge of the control board with his fingers. “Maybe he set automatic controls before he crashed. Then the time transfer—that energy triggered action somewhere . . . But I’m only guessing.”

“Set automatic controls for where?” Ross’s tongue swept over his lips as if they were dry.

“Home, maybe. This is it, boys—strap in!”

Travis fumbled with the straps of the seat and pulled them across his body clumsily. He, too, felt that last quiver of extra vibration.

Then a hand, an invisible force as large, as powerful as a mammoth’s foot, crushed down upon him. Under his body the seat straightened out into a swaying bed. He was fastened on it, unable to breathe, to think, to do more than feel, endure somehow the pain of flesh and bone under the pressure of that take-off. The blue square was one moment before his aching eyes—and then there was only blackness.

Travis came back to consciousness slowly, painfully aware of inner bruising. He tasted stale blood when he tried to swallow and found it hard to focus his eyes. That screen which had last been blue was now a dull black. As he moved the seat-bed under him swung violently, though the effort he had made was small. He raised his body, more cautiously pushing up with both hands.

On another swinging cot lay Ross Murdock. The lower part of his face was caked with blood, his eyes closed, his skin greenish white under the heavy tan and stain. The technician seemed to be in no better state. But under them, around them, the cabin was now quiet, devoid of either sound or vibration. Recognizing that, Travis fumbled with the strap across his middle and tried to get up.

This attempt brought disaster. His efforts drove him away from his support, right enough. But his feet did not touch the floor. Instead, he plunged out, weightless, to strike the edge of the main control board with force enough to raise a little yelp of pain. Panic-stricken, he held on to the board, pulling himself along until he could reach the technician. He tried to rouse the other, his methods growing rougher when they did not rouse signs of returning consciousness.

Finally the man groaned, turned his head, and opened his eyes. As awareness grew in their depths, so did surprise and fear.

“What—what happened?” The words were slurred. “You hurt?”

Travis drew the back of his hand across mouth and chin, brought it away clotted with blood. He must look as bad as Ross.

“Can’t walk.” He introduced the foremost problem of the moment. “Just—float . . .”

“Float?” repeated the technician, then he struggled up, unfastened his belt. “Then we are through—out of earth’s gravity! We’re in space!”

Jumbled fragments of articles he had read arose out of Travis’ memory. Free of gravity—no up, down—no weight— He was nauseated, his head spinning badly, but keeping hold of the board he worked his way past the technician to Ross. Murdock was already stirring, and as Travis laid his hand on his seat he moaned, his fingers sweeping aimlessly across his chest as if to soothe some hurt there. Travis gently caught the other’s bloody chin, shaking his head slowly from side to side as the gray eyes opened.

“ . . . and that’s it, we’re out!” Case Renfry, the technician, shook his head at the flood of questions from the time scouts. “Listen, fellas, I was loaned to this project to help with the breakdown appraisal. I can’t fly any ship, let alone this one—so it must be on automatic controls.”

“Set by the dead pilot. Then it should go back to his base,” Travis suggested gloomily.

“You are forgetting one thing.” Ross sat up with care, keeping firm hold on his mooring with both hands. “That pilot’s base is twelve thousand years or so in the past. They warped us through time before we took off—”

“And we can’t go home?” Travis demanded again of the technician.

“I wouldn’t try meddling with any key on that board,” Renfry said, shaking his head. “If we’re flying on automatic controls, the best thing is to keep on to the destination and then see what we can do.”

“Only there are a few other things to consider—such as food, water, air supplies,” Travis pointed out.

“Yes—air,” Ross underlined with chilling soberness. “How long might we be on the way?”

Renfry grinned weakly. “Your guess is as good as mine. The air supply is all right—I think. They had a recycling plant in the ship and Stefferds said it was in perfect working order. Something like algae in a sealed section keeps it fresh. You can look in at it but you can’t contaminate the place. And they breathed about the same mixture as we do. But as to food and water—we’d better look around. Three of us to feed . . .”

“Four! There’s Ashe!” Ross, forgetting where he was, tried to jump free of his seat. He swam forward in a tangle of flailing legs and arms until Renfry drew him down.

“Take it easy, mighty easy, fella. Hit the wrong button while you’re thrashing that way and we could be worse off than we are. Who’s Ashe?”

“Our section chief. We stowed him in a cabin down below, he had had a bad knock on the head.”

Travis aimed for the well leading to the center section of the globe. He overshot, bounced back, and was thankful when his fingers closed on the bar of its cover. They got it open and made their way clumsily in a direction Travis still thought of—in spite of the evidence of his eyes—as “down.”

To descend into the heart of the ship required an agility that tormented their bruised and aching bodies. But when they at last reached the cabin they found Ashe still safely stowed in the bunk, far better tended against the force of the take-off than they had been. For only his peaceful face showed above a thick mass of a jelly substance which filled the interior of the bunk-hammock.

“He’ll be all right. That’s the stuff they keep in their lifeboats to patch up the injured—saved my life once,” Ross identified. “A regular cure for anything.”

“How do you know so much?” Renfry began, and then, he eyes wonderingly on Ross, he added, “why—you must be the guy who was with the Russians on that ship they were stripping!”

“Yes. But I’d like to know a little more about this one. Food—water . . .”

They went exploring in Renfry’s wake, discovering adaptation to weightlessness a hard job, but determined to learn what they could about the best, and the worst, of their predicament. The technician had been all through the ship and now he displayed to them the air-renewal unit, the engine room, and the crew’s quarters. They made a detailed examination of what could only be a mess cabin combined with kitchen. It was a cramped space in which no more than four men—or man-like beings—could fit at one time.

Travis frowned at the rows of sealed containers racked in the cupboards. He extracted one, shook it near his ear, and was rewarded by a gurgle which made him run a dry tongue over his blood-stained lips. There must be liquid of a sort inside, and he could not remember now when he had had a really satisfying drink.

“This is water—if you want a drink.” Renfry brought a Terran canteen out of a corner. “We had four of these on board, used ’em while we were working.”

Travis reached for the metal bottle, but did not uncap it after all. “Still have all four?” Perhaps more than any of the rest on board he knew the value of water, the disaster of not having it.

Renfry brought them out, shaking each. “Three sound full. This one’s about half—maybe a little less.”

“We’ll have to go on rations.”

“Sure,” the technician agreed. “Think there’re some concentrate food bars here, too. You fellas have any of those?”

“Ashe still had his supply bag with him, didn’t he?” Travis asked Ross.

“Yes. And we’d better see how many of the bars we can find.”

Travis looked at the alien container which had gurgled. At the moment he would have given a great deal to be able to force the lid, to drink its contents and ease both thirst and hunger.

“We may have to come to trying these.” Renfry took the container from the scout, fitted it back into the holder space.

“I’d guess we’ll have to try a lot of things before this trip is over—if it ever is. Right now I’d like to try a bath, or at least a wash.” Ross surveyed his own scratched, half-naked, and very dirty body with disfavor.

“That you can have. Come on.”

Again Renfry played guide, bringing them to a small cubbyhole beyond the mess cabin. “You stand on that—maybe you can hold yourself in place with those.” He pointed to some rods set in the wall. “But get your feet down on that round plate and then press the circle in the wall.”

“Then what happens? You roast or broil?” Travis inquired suspiciously.

“No—this really works. We tried it on a guinea pig yesterday. Then Harvey Bush used it after he upset a can of oil all over him. It’s rather like a shower.”

Ross jerked at the ties of his disreputable kilt and kicked off his sandals, his movements sending him skidding from wall to wall. “All right. I’m willing to try.” He got his feet on the plate, holding himself in position by the rods, and then pressed the circle. Mist curled from under the edge of the floor plate, enveloped his legs, rose steadily. Renfry pushed shut the door.

“Hey!” protested Travis, “he’s being gassed!”

“It’s okay!” Ross’s disembodied voice came from beyond. “In fact—it’s better than okay!”

When he came out of the fogged cubby a few minutes later, the grime and much of the stain were gone from his body. Moreover, scratches that had been raw and red were now only faint pinkish lines. Ross was smiling.

“All the comforts of home. I don’t know what that stuff is, but it peels you right down to your second layer of hide and makes you like it. The first good thing we’ve found in this mousetrap.”

Travis shucked his kilt a little more slowly. He didn’t relish being shut into that box, but neither did he enjoy the present state of his person. Gingerly he stepped onto the floor disk, got his feet flattened on its surface, and pressed the circle. He held his breath as the gassy substance puffed up to enfold him.

The stuff was not altogether a gas, he discovered, for it was thicker than any vapor. It was as if he were immersed in a flood of frothy bubbles that rubbed and slicked across his skin with the effect of vigorous toweling. Grinning, he relaxed and, closing his eyes, ducked his head under the surface. He felt the smooth swish across his face, drawing the sting out of scratches and the ache out of his bruises and bumps.

When the bubbles ebbed and Travis stepped out of the cubby, he was met by a changed Ross. The latter was just hitching up over his broad shoulders the upper part of a tight, blue-green suit. It clung to his body, modeling every muscle as he moved. Made all in one piece, its feet were soled with a thick sponge that cushioned each step. Ross picked another bundle of blue-green from the floor and tossed it to the Apache.

“Compliments of the house,” he said. “I certainly never thought I’d want to wear one of these again.”

“Their uniforms?” Travis remembered the dead pilot. “What is this—silk?” He rubbed his hand over the sleek surface of a fabric he could not identify and was attracted by the play of color—blue, green, lavender—rippling from one shade to another as the material moved.

“Yes. It has its good points, all right—insulated against cold and heat, for one thing. For another, it can be traced.”

Travis paused, his arm half through the right sleeve. “Traced?”

“Well, I was trailed over about fifty miles of pretty rugged territory because I was wearing one like this. And they tried to get at me mentally, too, when I had it on. Went to sleep one night and woke up heading right back to the boys who wanted to collect me.”

Travis stared, but it was plain Ross meant every word he said. Then the Apache glanced down again at the silky stuff he was wearing, with an impulse to strip it off. Yet Murdock in spite of his story, was fastening the studs which ran from one shoulder to the other hip of his own garment.

“If we were in their time, I wouldn’t touch this with a fifty-foot pole,” Ross continued, smiling wryly. “But, seeing as how we are some thousands of years removed from the rightful owners, I’ll take the chance. As I said, these suits do have some points in their favor.”

Travis snapped his own studs together. The material felt good, smooth, a little warm, almost as soothing as the foam bubbles which had scoured and energized his tired body. He was willing to chance wearing the uniform. It was infinitely better than the hide garment he had discarded.

They were learning to navigate through weightlessness. The usual technique approached swimming, and they found convenient handholds to draw them along. If Travis could forget that the ship was boring on into the unknown, their present lodging had a lot to recommend it. But when the four of them gathered in the control cabin an hour or so later, they prepared to consider the major problem with what objectivity they could summon.

Ashe, alertly himself again, fresh from the healing of the aliens’ treatment, was their leader by unspoken consent. Only it was to Renfry that the three time scouts looked for hope. The technician had little to offer.

“The pilot must have set the ship’s controls on some type of homing device just before he died. I’m just guessing at this, you understand, but it is the only explanation to make sense now. When we explored here, my chief, working from what he knew of the tape records from the Russian headquarters, traced three installations; the one giving outside vision,” he began, tapping lightly on the screen which had been blue for those few precious moments before their involuntary take-off. “Another which is the inside com system connecting speakers all over the ship. And a third—this.” He pushed a lever to its head in a slot. Three winks of light showed on the board and out of the air above their heads came a sound which might have been a word in an unknown tongue.

“And what is that?” Ashe watched the lights with interest.

“Guns! We have four ports open now, and a weapon in each ready to fire. It was the chief’s guess that this was—is—a small military scout, or police patrol ship.” He clicked the lever back into place and the lights were gone.

“Not very helpful now,” Ross commented. “What about the chances for getting back home?”

Renfry shrugged. “Not a chance that I can see so far. Frankly, I’m afraid to do any poking around these controls while we’re in space. There is too good a chance of stopping and not getting started again—either forward or back.”

“That makes sense. So we’ll just have to keep on going to whatever port for which your controls are now set?”

Renfry nodded. “Not my controls, sir. This—all of this—is far advanced, and different—beyond our planes. Maybe, if I had time, and we were safely on ground, I could discover how the engines tick, but what makes them do so would still be another problem.”

“What’s the fuel?”

“Even that I can’t say. The engines are completely sealed. We didn’t dare pry too far.”

“And home port may be anywhere in the universe,” mused Ashe. “They had some type of distance-time jump—voyages couldn’t have lasted centuries.”

Renfry was studying the banks of buttons and levers with an expression of complete exasperation. “They could have every gadget in a fiction writer’s imagination, sir, and we wouldn’t know it—until the thing did or didn’t work!”

“Quite a prospect.” Ashe got up with caution, the careful motions of a novice in weightlessness. “I think a detailed exploration of the rest of our present home is now in order.”

There were three of the small living cabins, each equipped with two bunk-hammocks. And by experimenting with the wall panels they discovered clothing, personal effects of the crew. Travis did not like to empty those shallow cupboards and handle those possessions of dead men. But he did his share during the hunt for some clue which might mean the difference between life and death for the present passengers. He had opened a last small cavity in one locker when he caught a promising glitter. He picked up the object and found himself holding a rectangle of some slick material that felt like glass. It was milky white, blank when he picked it up. But the chill of the first touch faded as he turned it over curiously. The rim was bordered in a band of tiny flashing bits of yellow which might be gem stones—framing blankness instead of a picture.

A picture! If he could hold a picture of a far place—what sort would it be? Family—home—friends? He watched the plain surface within the border. Plain—? There was something there! Color was seeping up to the surface and spreading. Outlines were becoming solid. Bewildered, almost frightened, Travis studied that changing scene.

He did have a picture now. And one he knew. It was an entirely familiar scene—a stretch of desert and mountains. Why, he might be standing on the cliffs looking toward Red Horse Canyon! He wanted to throw the thing from him. How could an alien who lived twelve thousand years ago carry among his belongings a picture of the country Travis knew as home? It was unbelievable—unreal!

“What is it, son?” Ashe’s hand was real on his arm, Ashe’s voice warmed the chill congealing inside him as he continued to stare at the thing he held, the thing which, in spite of its familiar beauty, was wrong, terrible . . .

“Picture . . .” he mumbled. “Picture of my home—here.”

“What?” Ashe stepped closer and gave an exclamation, took the block out of Travis’ hands. The younger man wiped his sweating palms down his thighs, trying to wipe away the touch of that weird picture.

But, as he watched the desert scene, he cried out. For it was fading away, the colors were absorbed in the original white. The outlines of the cliffs and mountains were gone. Ashe held the plaque up in both of his hands. And now there was a new stirring in the depths, a murky flowing as again a scene grew into sharp brilliance.

Only this was not the desert, but a stand of tall, green trees Travis recognized as pines. Below them was a strand of gray-white sand, and beyond the pound of waves lashing high in foam against fanged rocks. Above that restless water white birds soared.

“Safeharbor!” Ashe sat down suddenly on the bunk and the picture shook as his hands trembled. “That’s the beach by my home in Maine—in Maine, I tell you! Safeharbor, Maine! But how did this get here?” His expression was one of dazed bewilderment.

“To me it showed my home also,” Travis said slowly. “And now to you another scene. Perhaps to the man who once lived in this cabin it also showed his home. This is a magic thing, I think. Not the magic which your people have harnessed to do their will, nor the magic of my Old Ones either.” Somehow the thought that this object bewildered the white man as much as it did him took away a little of the fear. Ashe raised his eyes from the scene of shore and sea to meet Travis’. Slowly he nodded.

“You may be guessing, but I’ll stake a lot on your guess being right. What they knew, these people—what wonders they knew! We must learn all we can, follow them.”

Travis laughed shakily. “Follow them we are, Doctor Ashe. About the learning—well, we shall see.”

A figure edged along the narrow corridor, his cushioned feet barely touching the floor. In the timeless interior of the spaceship where there was no change between day and night, Travis had had to wait a long time for this particular moment. His brown hands, too thin nowadays, played with the fastening of his belt. Under that was a gnawing ache which never left him now.

They had stretched their water supply with strict rationing, and the concentrate bars the same way. But tomorrow—or in the next waking period they would arbitrarily label “tomorrow”—they would have only four of those small squares. And Travis was keenly aware not only of that indisputable fact but of something which Ross had said when they had argued out the need for experiment with alien food supplies.

“Case Renfry,” the younger time agent had pointed out the obvious, “is certainly not going to be your tester. If we are ever going to be able to find out what makes this bus tick and get it started home again, he’s the one to do it. And, chief”—he had then turned upon Ashe—“you’ve the best brain—it’s up to you to help him. Maybe somewhere in this loot we’ve found you can locate a manual, or a do-it-yourself tape that’ll give us a fair break.”

They had been pulling over the material they had found in the cabins. Objects such as the disappearing picture were set aside on the hope that Ashe, with his archaeologist’s training in the penetration of age-old mysteries, might understand them through study.

“Which,” Ross had continued, “leaves the food problem up to a volunteer—me.”

Travis had remained quiet, but he had also made plans. He had already followed Ross’s reasoning to a logical end, but his conclusion differed from Murdock’s. Of the four men on board he, not Murdock, was certainly the most expendable. And the history of his people testified that Apaches possessed remarkably tough digestions. They had been able to live off a land where other races starved. So—he was now engaged in his own private project.

Last sleep period he had tackled the first container chosen from the supply cupboard, the one which had sloshed when shaken. He had swallowed two large mouthfuls of a sickly sweet substance with the consistency of stew. And, while the taste had not been pleasant, Travis had suffered no discomfort afterward. Now he chose a small round can, prying off the lid quickly while listening for any warning from the corridor.

He had left Ross asleep in the small cabin they shared and had looked in upon Renfry and Ashe before he made this trek. There was so little time and he had to wait a reasonable period between each tasting.

Travis wanted a drink, but he knew better than to take one. He had palmed his concentrate bar at the last “meal,” held the canteen to his mouth but not drunk, keeping his stomach empty. Now he studied his new selection with disgust.

It was a brown jelly that quivered slightly with the movement of the cylinder in his hand, its surface reflecting the light. Using the edge of the lid as an improvised spoon, Travis ladled a portion into his mouth. Unlike the stew, the stuff had little flavor, though he did not relish the greasy feel on his tongue. He swallowed, took a second helping. Then he chose a third sample—a square box. He would wait. If there were no ill effects from the jelly—then this. If he could prove four or five of these different containers held food the humans could stomach, they might have enough to outlast the voyage.

He did not return to his bunk. The magnetic bottoms of each container clung to the surface of the table, just as the thick soles of his suit feet clung to the walking surfaces in the ship when he planted them firmly. They had all adapted in a measure to the lack of gravity and the actual conditions of space flight. But Travis had a struggle to conceal his dislike of the ship itself, of the confinement forced upon them. And now, to sit alone brought him a fraction of comfort, for he dared to relax that strict control.

He had enjoyed the venture into time. The prehistoric world had been an open wilderness he could understand. But the ship was different. It seemed to him that the taint of death still clung to its small cabins, narrow corridors, and ladders. The very alienness of it was a menace far more acute than a sabertooth or a charging mammoth.

Once he had believed that he wanted to know more about the Old Ones. He had wanted to probe the mysteries which could be deduced from bits of broken pottery or an arrowhead pried from a dust-filled crevice. But those Old Ones had been distantly akin to him; those who had built this ship were not. For a moment or two his claustrophobia welled up, shaking his control, making him want to batter the walls about him with his fists, to beat his way out of this shell into the light, the air, into freedom.

But outside these walls there was no light, no air, and only the freedom of vacuum—or of the mysterious hyperspace that canceled the distance between the stars. Travis fought his imagination. He could not face that picture of the ship hanging in emptiness without even the frigid points of light to mark the stars—where there was nothing solid and stable.

The travelers could only hope that sometime they would reach the home port for which the dying alien pilot had set controls. But that course had been set twelve thousand—perhaps more—years ago. What port would they find waiting beyond the wall of time? Twelve-fifteen thousand years . . . These were figures too great for ordinary comprehension. At that time on earth, the first mud-walled villages had not yet been built, nor the first patch of grain sown to turn man from a wandering hunter into a householder. What had the Apache been then—and the white man? Roving hunters with skill in spear and knife and chasing game. Yet at that time the aliens had produced this ship, voyaged space, not only between the planets of a single system, but from star to star!

Travis tried to think of their future, but his thoughts kept sliding back to his craving for open space. He yearned to stand under the sun with wind—yes, even a desert wind hot and laden with grit—blowing against him. That longing was as acute as a pain—a pain!

His hands went to his middle. A sudden thrust of pure agony that rent him was not born out of any homesickness. The cramping was physical and very real. He bent half double, trying to ease that hot clawing in his insides as the cabin misted before his eyes. Then the stab was gone, and he straightened—until it caught him again. This was it. His luck at his second attempt with the alien food was bad.

Somehow he got to his feet, lurching against the table as a third bout of cramps caught him. The torture ebbed, leaving his hands and face wet. And in the few moments before the next pang he made it halfway along the corridor, reaching the haven he sought just as his outraged stomach finally revolted.

Travis would not have believed that two mouthfuls of a greasy jelly could so weaken a man. He pulled his spent body back to the mess cabin, dropping limply into a chair. More than anything now he wanted water, to cleanse the foulness from his mouth, to slake the burning in his throat. The canteens mocked him for he dare not take one up, knowing just how little of the precious liquid still remained.

For a while he hunched over the table, weakly glad of his freedom from pain. Then he drew the can of jelly to him. This must be marked poisonous. Only two containers had been tested—and how many more would prove impossible?

Only five concentrate bars were left, counting the one he had hidden that day. Nothing was going to multiply that five into ten—or into two hundred. If they were to survive the voyage of unknown duration, they must use some of this other food. But Travis could not control the shaking of his hands as he worked to free the lid of the square box. Maybe he was rushing things, taking another sample so soon after the disastrous effects of the other. But he knew that if he did not, right now, he might not be able to force himself to the third attempt later.

The lid came free and he saw inside dry squares of red. To his questing finger these had the texture of something between bread and a harder biscuit. He raised the can to sniff. For the first time the odor was faintly familiar. Tortillas paper-thin and crisp from the baking had an aroma not unlike this. And because the cakes did arouse pleasant memories, Travis bit into one with more eagerness than he would have believed possible moments earlier.

The stuff crumbled between his teeth like corn bread, and he thought the flavor was much the same, in spite of the unusual color. He chewed and swallowed. And the mouthful, dry as it was, appeared to erase the burning left by the jelly. The taste was so good that he ventured to take more than a few bites, finishing the first cake and then a second. Finally, still holding the box in one hand, he slumped lower in his seat, his eyes closing as his worn body demanded rest.

He was riding. There was the entrance to Red Horse Canyon, and the scent of juniper was in the air. A bird flew up—his eyes followed that free flight. An eagle! The bird of power, ascending far up into a cloudless sky. But suddenly the sky was no longer blue, but black with a blackness not born of night. It was black, and caught in it were stars. The stars grew swiftly larger—because he was being drawn up into the blackness where there were only stars . . .

Travis opened heavy-lidded eyes, looked up foggily at a blue figure. Looming over him was a thin, drawn face, slight hollows marked the cheeks, dark smudges under cold gray eyes.

“Ross!” The Apache lifted his head from his arm, wincing at the painful crick in his back.

The other sat down across the table, glanced from the array of supply containers to Travis and back again.

“So this is what you’ve been doing!” There was accusation in his tone, almost a note of outrage.

“You said yourself it was a job for the most expendable.”

“Trying to be a hero on the quiet!” Now the accusation was plain and hot.

“Not much of a one.” Travis rested his chin on his fist and considered the containers lined up before him. “I’ve sampled three so far—exactly three.”

Ross’s eyelids flickered down. His usual control was back in place, though Travis did not doubt the antagonism was still eating at him.

“With what results?”

“Number one”—Travis indicated the proper can—“too sweet, kind of a stew—but it stays with you in spite of the taste. This is number two.” He tapped the tin of brown jelly. “I’d say its only use was to get rid of wolves. This”—he cradled the can of red cakes—“is really good.”

“How long have you been at it?”

“I tried one last sleep period, two this.”

“Poison, eh?” Ross picked up the tin of jelly, inspecting its contents.

“If it isn’t poison, it puts up a good bluff,” Travis shot back a little heatedly, stung by the suggestion of skepticism.

Ross set it down. “I’ll take your word for it,” he conceded. “What about this little number?” He had arisen to stand before the cupboard, and now he turned, holding a shallow, round canister. It was hard to open, but at last they looked at some small dark balls in yellow sauce.

“D’you know, those might just be beans,” Ross observed. “I’ve yet to see any service ship where beans in some form or other didn’t turn up on the menu. Let’s see if they eat like beans.” He scooped up a good mouthful and chewed thoughtfully. “Beans—no—I’d say they taste more like cabbage—which had been spiced up a bit. But not bad, not bad at all!”

Travis found himself nursing a small wicked desire to have the cabbage-beans do their worst to Ross, not with as devastating results as the jelly—he wouldn’t wish that on anyone! But if they would just make themselves felt enough to prove to Murdock that food testing was not as easy as all that . . .

“Waiting for them to turn me inside out?” Ross grinned.

Travis flushed and then the stain spread and deepened on his cheeks as he realized how he had given himself away. He pushed the cracker-bread to one side and got up to select with inward—if not outward—defiance a tall cylinder which sloshed as he pried at its cap.

“Misery loves company,” Ross continued. “What does that smell like?”

Travis had been encouraged by his discovery of the bread. He sniffed hopefully at the cone opening, then snatched the holder away from his nose as a white froth began to puff out.

“Maybe you have the push-button soap,” Ross commented unhelpfully. “Give the stuff a lick, fella, you have only one stomach to lose for your country.”

Travis, so goaded, licked—suspicious and expecting something entirely unpalatable. But, to his surprise, though it was sweet, the froth was not so sickly as the stew had been. Rather, the result on the tongue was refreshing, carrying satisfaction for his craving for water. He gulped a bigger mouthful and sat waiting, a little tensely, for fireworks to begin inside him.

“Good?” Ross inquired. “Well, your luck can’t be rotten all the time.”

“This luck is mixed.” Travis capped the foam which had continued to boil wastefully from the bottle. “We’re alive—and we’re still traveling.”

“Traveling is right. A little more information as to our destination would be useful and comforting—or the reverse.”

“The world the builders of this ship owned can’t be too different from ours,” Travis repeated observations made earlier by Ashe. “We can breathe their air without discomfort, and maybe eat some of their food.”

“Twelve thousand years . . . D’you know, I can say that but I can’t make it mean anything real.” Ross’s hostility had either vanished or been submerged. “You say the words but you can’t stretch your imagination to make them picture something for you—or do you know what I mean?” he challenged.

Travis, rasped on an ancient raw spot, schooled his temper before he replied. “A little. I did four years at State U. There’s more to us than beads and feathers.”

Ross glanced up, a flicker of puzzlement in those cold gray eyes.

“I didn’t mean it like that—for what it’s worth.” Then he smiled and for the first time there was nothing superior or sardonic in that expression. “Want the whole truth, fella? I picked up what education I had before I went into the Project the hard way—no State U. But you studied the chief’s racket—archaeology—didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So—what does twelve thousand years mean to you? You deal with time in big doses, don’t you?”

“That’s a long span on our world, jumps one clear back to the cave period.”

“Yeah—before they put up the pyramids of Egypt—before they learned to read and write. Well, twelve thousand years ago, these blue boys had the stars for theirs. But I’m betting they haven’t kept them! There hasn’t been a single country on our world, not even China, that has had a form of civilization lasting that long. Up they climb and then—” he snapped his fingers. “It’s kaput for them, and another top dog takes over the power. So maybe when we get to this port Renfry believes we’re homing for, we’ll find nothing, or else someone else waiting for us there. You can bet one way or another and have a good chance of winning on either count. Only, if we do find nothing—then maybe our number’s up for sure.”

Travis had to accept the logic of that. Suppose they did come into a port which had ceased to exist, set down on a strange world from which they could not lift again because they had not the skill to pilot the ship. They would be exiles for the rest of their lives in a space uncharted by their kind.

“We’re not dead yet,” Travis said.

Ross laughed. “In spite of all our efforts? No—that’s our private battle cry, I think. As long as a man’s alive he’s going to keep kicking. But it would be good to know just how long we’re going to be shut up in this ship.” His usual flippancy of tone thinned at that last remark as if his carefully cultivated self-sufficiency was beginning to show the slimmest of cracks.

In the end their experiments with the food were partially successful. The crackers Travis continued to label “corn”; the foam and Ross’s cabbage-beans could be digested by a human being without difficulty. And they added to that list a sticky paste with the consistency of jam and a flavor approaching bacon, and another cake-like object which, despite a sour tang that puckered the mouth, was still edible. Greatly daring, Travis tapped the aliens’ water supply and drank. Though the liquid had an unpleasant metallic aftertaste, it was not harmful.

In addition the younger members of the involuntary crew made themselves useful in the cautious investigations carried on by Ashe and Renfry. The technician was in an almost constant state of frustration during the hours he spent in the control cabin trying to study machines he dared not activate or dismantle for the fuller examination he longed to make. Travis was seated behind him one morning—at least it was ten o’clock by Renfry’s watch, their only method of time-keeping—when there was a change to report, to report and take action on.

A shrill buzz pierced the usual silence, beeping what must be a warning. Renfry grabbed at the small mike of the ship’s com circuit.

“Strap down!” He rasped the order with rising excitement. “There’s an alert sounding here—we may be coming in to land. Strap down!”

Travis grabbed at the protecting bands on his chair. Below they must be scrambling for the bunks. There was vibration again—he was sure he could not mistake that. The ship no longer felt inert and drifting—she was coming alive.

What followed was again beyond his powers of description. It came in two stages, the first a queasy whirl of sensation not far removed from what they had experienced when the ship had been whirled through the time transfer. Limp from that, Travis lay back, watching the screen which had been blank for so long. And when his eyes caught what was now appearing there, he gave a cry of recognition.

“That’s the sun!”

A point of blazing yellow set a beacon in the black of space.

“A sun,” Renfry corrected. “We’ve made the big hop. Now it’s the homestretch—into the system . . .”

That blaze of yellow-red was already sliding away from the screen. Travis had an impression that the ship must be slowly rotating. Now that the brighter glare of the sun was gone he could pick up a smaller dot, far smaller than the sun which nurtured it. That held steady on the screen.

“Something tells me, boy,” Renfry said in a small and hesitant voice, “that’s where we’re going.”

“Earth?” A warm surge of hope spread through Travis.

“An earth maybe—but not ours.”

“We’re down.” Renfry’s voice, thin, harsh, broke the silence of the control cabin. His hands moved to the edge of the panel of levers and buttons before him, fell helplessly on it. Though he had had nothing to do with that landing, he seemed drained by some great effort.

“Home port?” Travis got the words out between dry lips. The descent had not been as nerve- and body-wracking as their take-off from his native world, but it had been bad enough. Either the aliens’ bodies were better attuned to the tempo of their ships, or else one acquired, through painful experience, conditioning to such jolts.

“How would I know?” Renfry flared, plainly eaten by his own frustration.

Their window on the outside world, the screen, did mirror sky again. But not the normal Earth sky with its blue blaze which Travis knew and longed to see again. This was a blue closer to the green hue of turquoise mined in his hills. There was something cold and inimical in that sky.

Piercing the open space was a structure which glinted like metal. But the smoothness of those dull red surfaces ended in a jagged splinter, raw against the blue-green, plainly marking a ruin.

Travis unfastened his seat straps and stumbled to his feet, his body once more adjusting clumsily to the return of gravity. As much as he had come to dislike the ship, to want his freedom from it, at this moment he had no desire to emerge under that turquoise sky and examine the ruin pictured on the screen. And just because he felt reluctance, he fought against it by going.

In the end they all gathered at the space lock while Renfry opened the fastening, then went on to the outer door. The technician glanced back over his shoulder.

“Helmets fastened?” His voice boomed hollowly inside the sphere now resting on Travis’ shoulders and secured by a close-fitting harness. Ashe had discovered those and had tested them, preparing for this time when they might dare a foray into the unknown. The bubble was equipped with no cumbersome oxygen tanks. It worked on no principle Renfry was able to discover, but the aliens had used these and the humans must trust to their efficiency now.

The outer port swung back into the skin of the ship. Renfry kicked out the landing ladder and backed down it. But each of them, as he emerged from the globe, glanced quickly around.

What lay below was a wide sweep of hard white surface which must cover miles of territory. This was broken at intervals by a series of structures of the dull red, metallic material set in triangles and squares. In the center of each of those was a space marked with black rings. None of the red structures was whole, and the landing field—if that was what it was—had the sterile look of a place long abandoned.

“Another ship . . .” Ashe’s arm swung up, his voice came to Travis through the helmet com.

There was a second globe, all right, reposing about a quarter of a mile away on one of the squares among the buildings. And beyond that Travis spotted a third. But nowhere was there any sign of life. He felt wind, soft, almost caressing, against his bare hands.

They descended the ladder and stood in a group at the foot of their own ship, a little uncertain as to what to do next.

“Wait!” Renfry caught at Ashe. “Something moved—over there!”

They had found weapons in the ship; now they drew those odd guns, twins to the one Ross had worn when Travis had first met him. The wind blew a fragment of long-dead vegetation before it. It caught against the globe and then was whirled away in a dreary dance.

But out of an opening at the foot of the red tower nearest to them something stirred. And Travis, watching that coil heading straight for them, froze. A snake? A snake unwinding to such a length that its questing head was approaching their stand while the end of its tail still lay within the ruin where it denned?

He took aim at that swaying coil. Then Renfry struck his wrist pads, knocking away the barrel of the weapon. And in that moment the Apache saw what the other had noticed first, that the snake was not a thing of flesh, skin, and supple bones, but of some manufactured material.

Something else moved through the door from which the snake had crawled. This newcomer strode forward by jerks, paused, came on, as if compelled to advance despite the limitations of ancient fabric and long wear. The thing was vaguely manlike in form, in that it advanced on stilt legs. But it had four upper appendages now folded against its central bulk, and where the head should have been there was a nodding stalk resembling the antennae of a com unit.

Its jerky walk with the many pauses conveyed internal discord, rust and wear, and the deterioration of time. How much time? The four humans stepped away from the ship, giving free passage to the strange partners from the tower.

“Robots!” Ross said suddenly. “They’re robots! But what are they going to do?”

“Refuel, I think.” Ashe rather than Renfry answered that.

“You’ve hit it!” The technician pushed forward. “But do they have fuel—now?”

“We’d better hope there is some left.” Ashe sounded bleak. “I’d say we aren’t supposed to stay here—better get back on board.”

The threat of being trapped here, of locked controls raising the ship and leaving them marooned, induced something close to panic in all three hearers. They raced to the ladder and began to climb. But when they reached the air lock, Renfry remained at the open door, relating the movements of the robots.

“I think that animated pipeline’s been connected—underneath. Can’t see what the walker’s doing—maybe he just stands by in case of trouble. And there’s something coming through the hose—you can see it swell! We’re taking on whatever we’re supposed to have!”

“A fueling station.” Ashe looked out over the wide stretch of crumbling towers and checkerboard landing spaces. “But look at the size of this place. It must have been constructed to handle hundreds, even thousands, of ships. And since they couldn’t all be in to refuel at the same time, that presupposes a fleet”—he drew a deep breath of wonder—“a fleet almost beyond comprehension. We were right—this civilization was galaxy-wide. Maybe it spread to the next galaxy.”

But Travis’ eyes rested on the splintered cap of the tower from which the robots had come. “It looks like no one has been here for some time,” he observed.

“Machines,” Renfry answered, “will go on working until they run down. I’d say that walking one down there is close to its final stop. We triggered some impulse when we landed on the right spot. The robots were activated to do their job—maybe their last job. How long since they worked the last time? This may have kept going for a long part of that twelve thousand years you’re always talking about—an empire dying slowly. But I wouldn’t try to measure the time. These aliens knew machinery, and their materials are better than our best.”

“I’d like to see the interior of one of those towers,” Ashe said wistfully. “Maybe they kept records, had something we could understand to explain it all.”

Renfry shook his head. “Wouldn’t dare try it. We might raise before you got inside the door. Ahh—the walker is going back now. I’d say get ready for take-off.”

They snugged the open port and the inner door of the space lock. Renfry, out of habit, went on up to the control cabin. But the other three took to their bunks. There was a waiting period and then once more the blast into space. This time they did not lose consciousness as they endured the stress of reentering space.

“Now what?” Hours later they squeezed into the mess cabin to hold a rather aimless conference concerning the future. Since no one had anything more than guesses to offer, none of them answered Renfry’s question.

“I read a book once,” Ross said suddenly with the slightly embarrassed air of one admitting to a minor social error, “that had a story in it about some Dutch sea captain who swore he’d get around the horn in one of those old-time sailing ships. He called up the Devil to help him and he never got home—just went on sailing through the centuries.”

“The Flying Dutchman,” Ashe identified.

“Well, we haven’t called up any Devil,” Renfry remarked.

“Haven’t we?” Travis had spoken his thoughts, without realizing until they all stared at him that he was done so aloud.

“Your Devil being?” Ashe prompted.

“We were trying to get knowledge out of this ship—and it wasn’t our kind of knowledge,” he floundered a little, attempting to put into words what he now believed.

“Scavengers getting their just desserts?” Ashe summed up. “If you follow that line of reasoning, yes, you have a point. The forbidden fruit of knowledge. That was an idea planted so long ago in mankind’s conscience that it lingers today as guilt.”

“Planted,” Ross repeated the word thoughtfully, “planted . . .”

“Planted!” Travis echoed, his mind making one of those odd jumps in sudden understanding of which he had only recently become conscious. “By whom?”

Then glancing around at the alien ship which was both their transport and their prison, he added softly, “By these people?”

“They didn’t want us to know about them.” Ross’s words came in a rush. “Remember what they did to that Russian time base—traced it all the way forward and destroyed it in every era. Suppose they did have contacts with primitive man on our world—planted ideas—or gave them such a terrifying lesson at one time or other that the memory of it was buried in all their descendants?”

“There are other tales beside your Flying Dutchman, Ross,” Ashe squirmed a little in his seat. None of the chairs in the ship quite fitted the human frame or provided comfort. “Prometheus and the fire—the man who dared to steal the knowledge of the gods for the use of mankind and suffered eternally thereafter for his audacity, though his fellow benefited. Yes, there are clues to back such a theory, faint ones.” His eagerness grew as he spoke. “Maybe—just maybe—we’ll find out!”

“The supply port was long deserted,” Travis pointed out. “There may be nothing left of their empire anywhere.”

“Well, we’ve not found the home port yet.” Renfry got to his feet. “Once we set down there—I hadn’t intended to say this, but if we ever get to the end of this trip, there’s a chance we may get back, providing—” He drummed his fingers against the door casing. “Providing we have more than our share of luck.”

“How?” demanded Ashe.

“The controls must now be set with some sort of a guide—perhaps a tape. Once we are grounded and I can get to work, that might just be reversed. But there are a hundred ‘ifs’ between us and earth, and we can’t count on anything.”

“There’s this, too,” Ashe added thoughtfully to that faintest of hopes. “I’ve been studying the material we have found. If we can crack their language tapes—some of the records we have discovered here must deal with the maintenance and operation of the ship.”

“And where in space are you going to find a Rosetta Stone?” returned Travis. He did not dare to believe that either of the two discoveries might be possible. “No common word heritage.”

“Aren’t mathematics supposed to be the same, no matter what language? Two and two always add to four, and principles such as that?” puzzled Ross.

“Please find me some symbols on any of those tapes you’ve been running through the reader that have the smallest resemblance to any numbers seen on earth.” Renfry had swung back to the pessimistic side of the balance. “Anyway—I’m not meddling with the machines in that control cabin while we’re still in space.”

Still in space—how long were they going to keep on voyaging? And somehow they found this second lap of their journey into nowhere worse than the first. All of them had been secretly convinced that there was only one goal, that their first star port would be their last. But the short pause to refuel now promised a much longer trip. Their only way of telling time was by the hours marked on the dial of Renfry’s watch. Days—Ashe made a record of those by counting hours. It was one week since they had left the fuel port—two days more.

Out of the sheer necessity for keeping their minds occupied, they pried at the puzzles offered them in the ship. Ashe had already mastered the operation of a small projector which “read” the wire-kept records, and so opened up not a new world, but worlds. The singsong speech which went with the pictures meant nothing to the humans. But the pictures—and such pictures! Three-dimensional, in full color, they allowed one a window on the incomprehensible life of a complex starfaring civilization.

Races, cultures, and only a third of them humanoid—were these factual records? Or were they fiction meant to divert and amuse during the long hours of space travel? Or real reports of some service action? They could guess at any answer to what they saw unrolled on the screen of the small machine.

“If this was a police ship and those are authentic reports of past cases,” commented Ross, “they sure had their little problems.” He had watched with rapt attention a lurid battle through a jungle on a waterlogged planet. The enemy there was represented by white amphibious things with a distracting ability to elongate parts of their bodies at will—to the discomfiture of opponents they were thus able to ensnare. “On the other hand,” he went on, “these may be just cheer-for-the-brave-boys-in-blue story writing to amuse the idle hour. How are we to know?”

“There’s one which I discovered this morning—of more interest to us personally.” Ashe sorted through the plate-shaped containers of record wire. “Take a look at this now.” He drew out the coil of the jungle battle and inserted the new spool.

Then they saw a sky, gray, lowering with thick clouds. Below it stretched a waste of what could only be snow such as they knew on their own world. A small party moved into the range of the picture, and the familiar blue suits of those in it were easy to distinguish against the gray-white of the monotonous background.

“Suggest anything to you?” Ashe asked of Ross.

Murdock was leaning forward, studying the picture with a new intentness that argued an unusual interest in so simple a scene.

There were four blue-suited, bald-headed humanoids. They wore no outer clothing and Travis remembered Ross’s remarks concerning the insulating qualities of the strange material. Over their heads they did have the bubble helmets, and they were traveling at a slow pace which suggested treacherous footing.

The tape blinked in one of those quick changes to which the viewers had become accustomed. Now they must be surveying the same country from the viewpoint of one of the four blue-clad travelers. There was a sudden, breath-taking drop; the camera must have skimmed at top speed down into a valley. Before them lay a second descent—and the perspectives were out of proportion.

They were not distorted enough, however, to hide what the photographer wanted to record. The viewers were gazing down onto a wide, level space and in that, half buried in banks of drifted snow, was one of the large alien freighters.

“It can’t be!” Ross’s expression was one of startled surprise.

“Keep watching,” Ashe bade.

At a distance, around the stranded half globe, black dots moved. They trailed off on a line marked clearly in the beaten snow. The path had been worn by a good amount of traffic. There was another disconcerting click and again they saw ice—a huge, murky wall of it, rearing into the gray sky. And directly to that wall of ice led the beaten path.

“The Russian time post! It must be! And this ship”—Ross was almost sputtering—“this ship must have been mixed up in that raid on the Russians!”

There was a last click and the screen went blank.

“Where’s the rest?” Ross demanded.

“You’ve seen all there is. If they recorded any more, it’s not on this spool.” Ashe fingered the colored tag fastened to the container from which he had taken the coil. “Nothing else with a label matching this, either.”

“I wonder if the Russians got back at them some way. If that was what killed off the crew later. Bio warfare . . .” Ross jiggled the switch of the projector back and forth. “I suppose we’ll never know.”

Then, over their heads, blasting the usual quiet of the ship, came the warning from the control cabin where Renfry kept his self-imposed watch.

“She’s triggering for another break-through, fellas. Strap down! I’d say we’re due for the big snap very soon!”

They hurried to the bunks. Travis pulled at his protecting webbing. What would they find this time? Another robot-inhabited way stop—or the home port they were longing to reach? He set himself to endure the wrench of the break-through from hyperspace to normal time, hoping that familiarity would render the ordeal easier.

Once more the ship and the men in it were wracked by that turnover which defied natural sensations.

“Sun ahead.” Travis, opening his eyes, heard Renfry’s voice, a little sharpened, through the ship-wide com. “One—two—four planets. We seem to be bound for the second.”

More waiting time. Then once more descent into atmosphere, the return of weight, the vibration singing through walls and floors about them. Then the set-down, this time with a slight grating bump, as if the landing had not been so well controlled as it had at the fueling port.

“This is different . . .” Renfry’s report trailed into silence, as if what he saw in the screen had shocked him into speechlessness.

They climbed to the control cabin and crowded below that window on the new world. It must be night—but a night which was alive with reddish light, as if some giant fire filled the sky with the reflection of its fury. And that light rippled even as flames would ripple in their leaping.

“Home?” This time Ross asked the question.

Renfry, entranced as he still watched that display of fiery light, made a usual cautious answer.

“I don’t know—I just don’t know.”

“We’ll try a look-see from the port.” Ashe took up his planet-side command.

“Might be a volcano,” Travis hazarded from his experience in the prehistoric world.

“No, I don’t think so. I’ve only seen one thing like that—”

“I know what you mean.” Ross was already on the ladder. “The Northern Lights!”

The checkerboard spread of the fueling port, different as its architecture had been, was yet not too far removed from their own experience. But this—Travis gazed at the wild display beyond the outer door—this was the most fantastic dream made real.

That flickering red played in tongues along the horizon, filling about a quarter of the sky, ascending in licks up into the heavens. It paled stars and battled the moon which hung there—a moon three times the size of the one which accompanied his home planet.

Rippling out from about the ship was a stretch of cracked, buckled field that had once been smoothly surfaced. There was a faint crackling in the air which did not come from any wind but from static electricity. And the lurid light with its weaving alternately illuminated and reduced to shadow the whole countryside.

“Air’s all right.” Renfry had cautiously slipped off his helmet. At his report the others freed their own heads. The air was dry, as arid as desert wind.

“Buildings of some sort—in that direction.” They turned heads to follow Ross’s gesture.

Whereas the towers of the fueling field, ruined as they were, had fingered straightly into the sky, these structures, or structure, hugged the earth, the tallest portion not topping the globe. And nowhere in the red light could Travis sight anything suggesting vegetation. The desolation of the fuel port had been apparent, but here the barrenness was menacing.

None of them was inclined to go exploring under that fiery sky, and nothing moved in turn toward the ship. If this was another break in their journey, intended for the purpose of servicing their transport, the mechanics had broken down. At last the humans withdrew into the ship and closed the port, waiting for day.

“Desert . . .” Travis said that half to himself but Ashe glanced at him inquiringly.

“You mean—out there?”

“There’s a feel in the air,” Travis explained. “You learn to recognize it when you’ve lived most of your life with it.”

“Is this the end of the trip?” Ross asked Renfry again.

“I don’t know.” They had climbed back to the control cabin. Now the technician was standing in front of the main control panel. He was frowning at it. Then he turned suddenly to Travis.

“You feel desert out there. Well, I feel machines—I’ve lived with them for most of my life. We’ve set down here, there’s no indication that we’re going to take off again. Nothing but a sense that I have—that we’re not finished yet.” He laughed, a little self-consciously. “All right, now tell me that I’m seeing ghosts and I’ll have to agree.”

“On the contrary, I agree with you so thoroughly that I’m not going too far from the ship.” Ashe smiled in return. “Do you suppose this is another fuel stop?”

“No robots out,” Ross objected.

“Those could have been immobilized or rusted away long ago,” Renfry replied. He appeared sorry now that he had raised that doubt.

They went at last to their bunks, but if any of them slept, it was in snatches. To Travis, lying on the soft mattress which fitted itself to the comfort of his body, there was no longer any security—the ambiguous security offered by the ship while in flight. Now outside the shell he could rest his hand against was an unknown territory more liable to offer danger than a welcome. Perhaps the display of fiery lights in the night, perhaps the dry air worked on him to produce the conviction that this was not a world of machines left to carry out tasks set them before his kind had evolved. No, there was life here and it waited—outside.

He must have dozed, for it was Ross’s hand on his shoulder which brought him awake. And he trailed after the other to the mess. He ate, still silent, but with every nerve in his gaunt body alert, convinced that danger lay outside.

They went armed, strapping on the belts supporting the aliens’ weapons. And they issued into a merciless sunlight, as threatening with its white brilliance as the flames of the night before.

Ashe shielded his eyes with his hand. “Try wearing the helmets,” he ordered. “They might just cut some of the glare.”

He was right. When they fastened down the bubbles, the material cut that daylight so that their eyes were unaffected.

Travis had been right, too, in his belief that they were in desert country. Sand—dunes of white sand, glittering with small sun-reflecting particles which must be blinding to unshielded eyes—crept over the long-deserted landing space. Here were no other grounded ships like the ones at the first galactic port, only lonely sweeps of sand, unbroken by the faintest hint of vegetation.

Sand—and buildings, low, earth-hugging buildings—perhaps a quarter of a mile away.

The four from the ship hesitated at the foot of the ladder. It was not only Renfry’s hunch that their voyage was not completed that kept them tied to the globe. The barrenness of the countryside certainly was no invitation to explore. And yet there was always a chance that some discovery might help to solve the abiding riddle of their return.

“We do it this way.” Ashe, the veteran explorer, took over with decisive authority. “You stay here, Renfry—up at the door. Any sign the ship is coming to life again and you fire—on maximum.”

A bolt of the force spewed from the narrow muzzle of the alien weapon would produce crackling blue fire which should be visible for miles. They were not sure of the range of the helmet coms, but they could be certain of the effectiveness of a force bolt as a warning.

“Can do!” Renfry was already swinging up the ladder, displaying no disappointment in not being one of the explorers.

Then, with Ashe in the center and the lead, the other two flanking him a little behind and to the right and left, the humans headed for the buildings. Travis mechanically studied the sand under foot. What he was searching for he could not have told, nor would that loose sand have held tracks—tracks! He glanced back. The faint depressions which marked his footsteps were already almost indistinguishable. There was certainly nothing to indicate that anyone—or anything—had passed over that portion of the forgotten base for days, months, years, generations.

But the sand was not everywhere. He stepped aside to avoid a broken block of the pavement tilted up to one side and forming a hollow—a concealing hollow. Travis hesitated, gazing down into that hollow.

Last night a wind had swept across this field; he had felt it up at the port of the ship. Today the air was dead, not a breeze troubled the lightest drift of sand. And that hollow was free of sand. He did not know why his instincts told him that this was wrong. But because he was nudged by that subconscious uneasiness, he went down on his knees to study the interior of the pocket with the close scrutiny of a hunter-tracker.

So he saw what he might otherwise have missed—a depression marked in the soil where the sand had not drifted. On impulse he rubbed his fingertips hard across that faint mark. There was a greasy feel. He unfastened his helmet long enough to raise those same investigating fingers to his nostrils.

A rank odor—sweat of something alive—something with filthy body habits. He was sure of it! And because that thing must have crouched here for a long time in its well-chosen hiding place to watch the ship undetected, he could also believe it possessed intelligence—of a kind. Snapping down his helmet once more, he reported his find over the com.

“You say it must have been there for some time?” Ashe’s voice floated back.

“Yes. And it can’t have been gone long either.” He was basing all his deductions upon that lingering taint which had been imparted by a warm body to the dusty earth within the small shelter.

“No tracks?”

“They wouldn’t show in this stuff.” Travis scuffed his foot across a small fan of sand. No, no tracks. But there could only be one place from which the hidden watcher had come—those buildings half concealed by the creeping dunes. He stood up, walked forward, his hand swinging very close to the weapon at his belt. The sense of danger was very strong.

Ashe stood before the midpoint of the buildings—there was really only one as they could see now. Each of its two outlying wings was connected by a low-lying, windowless passage to the main block. Travis was familiar with the effects of wind and blown-sand erosion upon rock outcrops. Here the same factors had operated to pit surfaces, round and polish away corners and edges, until the walls were like the dunes rising about them.

There were no windows—no visible doorways. But at the end of the wing before Travis there was a dip in the sand dune, breaking the natural line chiseled by the wind. It was a break unusual enough to catch his alerted attention.

“Over here,” he called softly, forgetting that the helmet com and not the air waves carried his voice. Slowly, with the caution of a stalker after wary game, he moved toward that break in the dune. There were no tracks, yet he was almost certain that the disturbance had been recent and made by the passage of something moving with a purpose—not just the result of a vagary of the night wind.

He rounded the pointing finger of one dune which rose at his shoulder height against the wall, and knew he was right. The sand had obviously been thrust back—blocked loosely on either side—as if some door had opened outward from the building, pushing the sand drift before it.

“Cover him!” Ashe’s shadow crossed the sun-drenched sand of the dune, met the other one cast by Ross. With the two time agents at his back, the Apache began a detailed inspection of that length of wall.

Although his eyes could detect no difference in that surface, his fingers did when he ran them along about waist level. There was a strip here, extending down to the ground, which was not of the same texture as the substance above and to the sides. But though he pressed, pulled, and applied his weight to move it in every way he could think to try, there was no yielding. He was sure that that portion could open, to cause the marks in the sand.

At last, getting down on his hands and knees, Travis crawled along, trying to force fingertips under at ground’s edge. And so he discovered a harsh tuft of protruding hair. Combined efforts of knife tip and fingers worked the wisp loose. It was coarse stuff, coarser than any animal’s he had ever seen, each separate hair was larger than six strands of a horse’s mane. And it was gray-white in color, melting into the shade of the sand so it could not be distinguished against the dunes.

Having a greasy feel, it clung to Travis’ fingers. He did not really need the evidence of his nose to tell him that it was rankly odorous. He brought it back to Ashe, his distaste in handling it growing steadily. The latter put the trophy away in one of his belt pockets.

“Any chance of opening that?” Ashe indicated the hidden door in the wall.

“Not that I can see,” Travis returned. “It is probably secured on the inside.”

They studied the building dubiously. Behind its length, as far as they could judge, there was only a waste of sand dunes reaching out and out to the sky rim where the fire had played the night before. If there was any riddle to be solved, its answer lay inside this locked box and not in the desert countryside.

“Ross, you stay here. Travis, move on to the end of the wing. Stay there where you can see Ross—and me, as I go along the back.”

Ashe used the same care as the Apache had done, running his hands along the eroded surface, seeking any indication of another door which might possibly be forced. He went the entire length of the building and came back—with nothing to report.

“There were windows once and a door. But they were all walled up a long time ago, sealed tight now. We might pick out the sealing, given time and the right tools.”

Ross’s voice came through the helmet coms. “Any chance of getting in through the roof, chief?”

“If you’re game to try—up with you!”

Travis stood against the wall which refused to give up its secrets and Ross used him as a ladder, mounting to the roof. He moved inward and the two left on the ground lost sight of him. But on Ashe’s orders he made a running commentary of what he saw through the com.

“Not much sand—you’d think there would be more . . . Hulloo!” There was an eagerness in that sudden exclamation. “This is something! Round plates set in circles all over—about the size of quarters. They are solid and you can’t move them.”

“Metal?”

“Nooo . . .” The reply was hesitant. “Seem more like some kind of glass, opaque rather than transparent.”

“Windows?” suggested Travis.

“Too small,” Ross protested. “But there are a lot of them—all over. Wait!” The urgency in that last cry alerted both the men on the ground. “Red—they’re turning red!”

“Get out of there! Jump!” Ashe’s order barked loudly in all their helmets.

Ross obeyed without question, landing with a paratrooper’s practiced roll on one of the dune crests. The others scrambled to join him, all their attention focused on the roof of the sealed building. Perhaps something in the sun-repelling qualities of their helmets enabled them to see those rays as faint reddish lines cutting up from the roof far into the sky.

The skin on Travis’ bare hands tingled with a pins-and-needles sensation as if the circulation in it had been arrested and was not coming back to duty. Ross scrambled up out of the sand and shook himself vigorously.

“What in the world is going on?” There was an unusual note of awe in his tone.

“I think—some fireworks to discourage you. I believe that we may assume whoever lives in there is definitely not at home to curious callers. Not only that, but the householder has some mighty unpleasant gadgets to back up his desire for privacy. Probably just as well we didn’t find his, her, or its front door unlocked.”

Travis could no longer see those thin fiery lines. Either the power had been shut off, or the rays were now past the point of detection by human eyes, even with the aid of the helmet. That coarse hair, the repulsive odor—and now this. Somehow the few facts did not add properly. The hair, of course, could have been left by a watchdog, or the equivalent on this particular planet of a watchdog. That supposition would also fit with the low entrance into the building. But a watchdog that kept to carefully chosen cover, the best in the whole landscape, and stayed to spy, maybe for hours, on the ship—? Those facts did not fit with the nature of any animal he had ever known. Rather, that action matched with intelligence, and intelligence meant man.

“I believe they are nocturnal,” Ashe said suddenly. “That fits with all we’ve seen so far. This sun glare may be as painful for them as it is for us without helmets. But at night—”

“Going to sit up and watch what happens?” Ross asked.

“Not out in the open. Not until we know more.”

Silently Travis agreed to that. There was a furtiveness about the last night’s spying which made him wary. And to his mind this world was far more frightening and sinister than the fueling port. Its very arid barrenness held a nebulous threat he had never sensed in the desert lands of his own planet.

They walked back to the ship, climbed the ladder, and were glad to close the port upon the dead white glare, to unhelm in the blue glow of the interior.

“What did you see?” Ashe asked Renfry.

“Murdock taking a high dive from the roof and then some red lines, very faint, shooting up from all over its surface. What did you do, push the wrong doorbell?”

“Probably waked somebody up. I don’t think that’s a very healthy place to go visiting. Lord—what a stink!” Ross ended, sniffing.

Ashe held on his palm the tuft of hair. The odor rising from it was not only noticeable in the usual scentless atmosphere of the ship, but penetrating in its foulness.

They carried the lock into the small cubbyhole which might once have been the quarters of the commander and where Ashe had assembled his materials for study. In spite of the noisome effluvia of their trophy, they gathered around as he pulled the tuft apart hair by hair and spread it flat.

“Those hairs—so thick!” Renfry marveled.

“If they are hairs. What I wouldn’t give for a lab!” Ashe folded a clear sheet of the aliens’ writing materials to imprison the lock.

“That smell—” Travis, remembering how he had handled the noisome find, rubbed his hand back and forth across his thigh.

“Yes?” Ashe prompted.

“Well—I think that comes from just plain filthiness, sir. Or, part might be because the hairs are from a creature we don’t know.”

“Alien metabolism.” Ashe nodded. “Each human group has a distinctive body odor far more apparent to others than to one of his own breed. But what are you getting at, Travis?”

“Well, if that does come from some—some man,” he used the term because he had no other—“and not from an animal, then I’d say he was living in a regular sty. And that means either a pretty low type of primitive, or a degenerate.”

“Not necessarily,” Ashe pointed out. “Bathing entails water, and we haven’t seen any store of water here.”

“Sure, there’s no water we can see. But they must have some. And I think—” Only there were few proofs he could offer to bolster his argument.

“Might be. Anyway, tonight we’ll watch and see what does come out of the booby-trapped box over there.”

They napped during the day, Renfry in the control cabin as usual. None of them could see any reason why the ship had earthed on this sand pile, and the very barrenness of the place reinforced Renfry’s belief that this could not be their ultimate goal. It was only logic that the ship must have originally voyaged from some center of civilization—and this was not that.

The glare of the sun was gone and dusk clothed the mounds of creeping sand when they gathered again at the door in the outer skin to watch the building and the stretch of ground lying between them and that enigmatic block.

“How long do you suppose we’ll have to wait?” Ross shifted position.

“No time at all,” Ashe answered softly. “Look!”

From behind the dune which marked the low doorway Travis had discovered, there showed a very faint reddish glow.

Had the flaming display of the late evening before been in progress, they could not have spotted that. And now, in the dusk, with the shapes of the dunes distorting vision, it was difficult to see. Ashe was counting slowly under his breath. As he reached “twenty” the glow vanished with a sudden completeness which suggested the slamming of a door.

Travis strained his eyes, watching the end of that masking dune. If the thing which had spied upon them the night before was coming back to the old position, the shortest route to take would cross that point. But he had seen nothing so far.

There was a very thin sound, but that came from the opposite direction, a whispering from the open country. Then a pat of arid air touched his cheek, wind rising with the coming of night. And the whispering must be sand grains moving under its first tentative stir.

“We could ambush one scout,” Ross observed wistfully.

“Their senses may be more acute than ours. Certainly if they are nocturnal, their night sight will be. And we can believe that they are already suspicious of us. Also, I’d like to know a little more about the nature of something or someone I’m going to lay a trap for.”

Travis only half heard Ashe. Surely he had seen a flicker of movement out there. Yes! His fingers closed on the older man’s arm in swift warning pressure. A blob of shadow had slipped from the end of the dune, skidded quickly into hiding, heading straight for the hollow behind the upended block of masonry. Was the spy now settled in for a long spell of duty in that improvised observation post? Or tonight would he, she or it venture closer to the ship?

The dusk deepened and with the coming of true dark the tongues of fire danced in the sky. Though the light afforded by that display was not steady, it did illuminate the smoother ground immediately about the globe. Any attack on the part of the unknown natives could be sighted by the men on guard above. The humans knew, though, that with the ladder up and open port some dozen feet removed from ground level, they had little to fear from any actual attempt to force their stronghold. Unless the creatures out there possessed weapons able to cut down the distance advantage.

“Close the inner-lock door,” Ashe said suddenly. “We’ll shut off the ship’s light, make it hard for them to spot us here.”

With the lock shut and the blue light of the ship blanked out, they lay flat on the floor of the cramped space, trying not to hamper each other, awaiting the next move on the part of the lurker or lurkers below.

“Something there,” Ross warned softly. “To the left—right at the end of that last dune.”

The lurker was impatient. A blob of dark, which might have been a head, moved against the white sand. Wind sang around the ship, gathering up grit. The men snapped down their helmets in protection against that. But those whirls of sand devils did not appear to bother the native.

“I think there are more than one of them,” Travis said. “That last movement came too far away from the first I sighted.”

“Could they be getting ready to rush us?” Ross wondered.

Oddly enough, none of the humans had drawn his weapon. Their perch was so high above the surface over which the attackers must advance, and the smooth rounding of the unclimbable globe was so apparent, that both gave them a sense of security.

The dark thing made a dart toward the globe. And it either ran bent almost double—or else on all fours! One of the startling jumps of the sky’s light spotlighted the form, and the watchers exclaimed.

Man or animal? The thing had four long limbs, and two more projections at mid-body. The head was round, down-held as it darted, so that they could not sight any features. But the whole body was matted with hair—dark hair, not light to match the tuft Travis had found. There was no sign of clothing, nor did the creature appear to be carrying weapons.

For a single moment that flitting shadow paused, facing the ship. Then it scurried back into hiding among the dunes once more. There was another flash of movement which the watchers could hardly detect, as this time the body of the runner merged in color with the sand about it.

“That might have been your hair shedder,” remarked Ashe. “It certainly was lighter in color than the first one.”

“They come in different colors—but all about the same size,” Ross added. “And what in the world are they?”

“Nothing in our world.” Ashe was definite about that. “We can believe, though, that they are interested in this ship and that they are trying to find some way of getting to it undetected.”

“The way they move,” Travis said, “as if they feared attack . . . They must have enemies.”

“Enemies to be associated with such a ship as this?” Ashe jumped to the point with his usual speed of understanding. “Yes, that could be. Only I don’t believe that there has been a ship here for a long, long time.”

“Memories passed down—”

“Memories would mean they are men!” Travis was not aware until he voiced those words out of a sense of outrage that he abhorred association with those half-seen creatures in the dunes.

“To themselves they may be men,” Ashe returned, “and we might represent monsters. All relative, son. At any rate, I believe that they do not regard us with kindness.”

“What I wouldn’t give for a flashlight now,” Ross said wistfully. “I’d like to catch one of them in a beam for a really good look.”

They were treated to a wealth of half glimpses of the natives moving through the sand hills as the minutes crawled on, but never did they have a chance really to study one.

“I think they’re working their way around to come in behind the globe—on our blind side,” Travis offered, having traced at least two in that possible direction.

“Won’t do them any good—this is the only opening.” Ross sounded close to smug.

But the thought of the natives coming in behind the globe could not be accepted so easily by Travis. Every buried instinct of hunter and desert warrior argued that such a chance threatened his own security. Reason told him, though, that there was only this one door to the ship, and that it was easily defended. They need only close it and nothing could reach them.

“What was the reason for this port anyway?” Ross pursued the big question a few seconds later. “There must have been some purpose for stopping here. Do we have to find something—or do something—before we can leave again?”

That thought had ridden all their minds, but Ross had brought fear into the open. And what if the solution lay over there, in that building to which there was no entrance—unless one could be forced at night? A nighttime entrance guarded by the flitting hairy things which could see in the dark and whose home hunting-ground it was . . .

“The building—?” Travis made a question of it. He felt Ashe stir beside him.

“Might just be,” the other assented. “If we are hung up here much longer, we can try burning our way in by day. These weapons pack a pretty hefty charge when set at maximum.”

Travis’ hand shot out, clamped down on Ashe’s shoulder. His helmet was locked against the grit drift in the wind, but his hand had been resting on the edge of the door casing and had caught that thud-thud transmitted by the outer skin of the globe. Below the bulge which kept the humans from viewing the ground directly under the curve of the side, something was beating on the metallic outer casing of the vessel—for what purpose and with what result, he could not guess. He groped for Ashe’s hand, drew it out beside his own and pressed the palm flat to get the same message.

“Pounding, I think.” He realized that the messages in helmet coms could not reach the ears of lurkers below. “But why?”

“Trying to hole the ship?” Ross hung over the other two. “They’ve no chance of getting through the hull—or have they?” His concluding flash of anxiety was shared by the rest. What did they know of the resources of the natives?

Coiled beside Travis was the ladder. Dare he push that out, climb over to see what the night creepers were doing below? The thud of the pounding appeared to him to be taking on both speed and intensity. Suppose by some miracle, or the use of some unknown tool, the hairy things could pierce the outer skin of the globe? Then there would be no possible hope of escape from this forgotten desert.

He began to edge the ladder forward. Ashe made a grab which the younger man fended away.

“We have to see,” he said, “we have to!”

Ross and Ashe moved together and in that narrow space blocked each other long enough for Travis to squeeze through the door, swing over the lip and climb down the length of his own body. Then he felt the ladder catch tight and knew that the other two were preventing its descent to ground level.

Gripping the rungs tightly, holding his body as close as he could to the surface of the ship, Travis looked down. The play of red flashes against the sky furnished a weird light for the activity below, for there was activity. He had been right. The hairy things had crept in unseen from behind the ship, and a group of them were now clustered about the base of the globe. But what they were doing he could not make out in the constant flickering of the light. Then one reared from its usual quadrupedal stance, and raised its forearms over its hump of head. The appendages at its midsection gave a twist, writhed out in a manner which suggested bonelessness, and clasped tight to the ship.

The creature gave a bound into the air and then hung, its hind feet now a foot or so off the ground. Apparently it held on by the grip of waist tentacles against the globe, while the fists or paws on its forelimbs pounded vigorously against that surface. There was something about that hitching climb, squirming upward as Travis watched, that spelled purposeful malevolence.

Now a second creature had hitched itself to the hull by midsection tentacles and was beginning to ascend. Travis could sight no weapons, nothing but those steadily pounding fists. But neither did he have any wish to battle the slow climbers. He reported to Ashe and was ordered back into the ship. They closed the port, took the precaution of sealing it as if making ready for flight, and then loosened their helmets.

Neither the pounding nor the sound of the climbers could reach them now. But Travis did not believe that the creatures had ceased their efforts to win into the ship, futile as those efforts might seem. The humans climbed to the control cabin to watch the outer world on the limited view of the screen. Renfry looked puzzled.

“I don’t get it. I still say that I’m sure this isn’t the end of the flight. But I can’t tell you why, or the why of this port, either. If the answer lies in that building, you’ll have to crack it open. But we may have a better cracker than just those hand weapons.”

Ross caught his meaning first. “The ship’s guns!”

“Might be.”

“Can we use them?” Ashe wanted to know.

“Well, they’re less a top secret than the rest of the stuff around here. Remember this?” He pressed a lever. Lights winked, that word from a vanished language spoke out of the thin air. It was all as it had been on their exploration of the ship.

“And you can fire them?”

“The chief—my chief—doped out that this does that”—Renfry fingered another switch he did not depress. “As far as I deduce, one of those king-sized blasters should just about clip across the roof of your strongbox. We can try it on for size any time you’re ready.”

But Ashe was rubbing his jaw in that absent-minded way which meant he had not yet come to a decision. “Too much guessing in all of this. We don’t know that we have to crack that place open in order to lift ship again. In fact, if we did crack it and couldn’t find what we needed—we wouldn’t be any better off. These natives must depend upon that shelter for their lives. Break it open and they’re just as dead as if we mowed them down with guns. They may not be anything or anybody we’d care to live with, but this is their world and we’re intruders. I’d like to wait a little before I try anything as drastic as blowing up the place.”

None of them was inclined to push him into action. Outside the flames beat into the night sky, and the white of the moon they had noted the night before was marred by a more yellow gleam from a smaller satellite trailing behind the larger. But of the activity of the dune skulkers the screen gave them no clue.

That came not by sight but by a startling shifting of the ship itself. How had the creatures outside achieved that movement? Perhaps, Travis imagined, by the sheer weight of many creeping bodies plastered to the hull. The globe canted from its landing position. And maybe that triggered the flying controls. For the now-familiar warnings of a take-off alerted them all.

“No!” Renfry protested, “we can’t—not yet—not until we know why.”

But the engines the humans did not understand, and could not hope to control, had no ears for that feeble defiance. Perhaps only a time limit had governed their visit, a full day and night of planetary time. Or maybe it was the strange attack of the hairy things.

And those creatures—would they free themselves in time, drop to the ground as the ship lifted, warned by the vibrations? Or would they cling in stupid concentration upon their attack, to be carried out into the freezing blackness of the eternal night?

The unwilling crew of the ship followed the old routine of strap down and wait for the wrench of blast-off, the break into hyperspace. Again they were being carried into the unknown with perhaps a long voyage ahead.

But it was not to be the same this time. Travis noticed the first departure from the usual routine. The take-off was not so severe—or else he had adjusted to it far better than he ever had before. He did not black out completely, nor did he have to undergo that terrible inner twisting. And he heard Renfry’s voice exclaim in wonder:

“I don’t think we went into hyper! What happened?”

They were up and about, watching the screen of the ship. Renfry’s guess was right. For instead of the complete blackness which closed in upon them when they made a big inter-system jump, they saw now the receding orb of the desert planet, its face a mass of shifting color as they withdrew from it.

“Must be heading for another planet in this same system,” Ashe supplied one answer. And, as the hours wore on, they believed that was the right one. The ship now appeared to be on course for the third planet of that unknown sun.

“Do we visit them all?” inquired Ross with some of his old flippancy. “If so—why? Parcel delivery?”

Three days went by, four. They ate the alien food and moved restlessly about the ship, unable to pay attention for any length of time to anything but the screen in the control cabin. Then on the sixth day, came the signals of an approaching landing.

On the screen the goal showed a vivid blue-green, patched here and there with orange-red under clouds. They had drawn lots for the occupancy of the three seats in the control cabin, and the odd man to be relegated to the bunk below. So Travis now lay alone and unseeing in the heart of the throbbing globe, wondering what new future they must confront.

The ship set down this time in the planet’s day. The Apache freed himself from his straps, stumbled in the return clutch of gravity to the ladder and climbed up to share the others’ view of the new world.

“No—!”

The ruined towers standing starkly to portion off the expanse of the fueling port had speared as straightly into the sky—but they had not been like this one. Against a background of cloudless, delicate pink, was an opaline dome. It curved in flowing lines which spiraled up in turn to a fragile frosting of lace. It was nothing like a human construction.

Torn lace . . . As he studied those lifting spans, Travis could mark the breaks which spoiled the perfect pattern. Yet in spite of that damage there was still the fantastic beauty of form and light and play of rainbow color. It rose out of dark foliage tinged with blue unlike the green of his own world’s leaves.

And those leafy branches stirred almost languidly as if light breezes pulled at them, showing here and there a touch of other colors. Fruit? Flowers?

Renfry brought their attention away from the scene which was so ethereal as to seem unreal.

“Look!”

He was on his feet before the main control board, his hands grasping the back of the pilot’s seat so tightly that the muscles stood out on his taut arms. For the board had taken on life. They had witnessed the flickers of light which had heralded the readying of the ship’s guns. This was something else—a line of small winks of brilliance flowing unevenly down the rows of levers and buttons. And where each flashed a lever arose, a button sank or snapped above the level of the board. There was a final burst of light from a spot Travis could have covered with his thumb. And there a lid opened and a cavity beneath disgorged a small, coin-shaped bit of red metal that tinkled out, to roll across the floor.

Renfry came to life, dove to catch it up. He held it in his hand as if the disk was something very precious indeed.

“Home port!” He swung about to face them, his eagerness lighting a flame in his eyes. “This is the home port! And I think I am holding the course tape!”

There could be no other explanation for what they had just witnessed. The journey plotted by a dying man had come to its full conclusion. That small button of metal Renfry had closed his fist upon, held now not only the secret of their arrival—but of their return. If they were ever to regain their own world, it would be because they had solved the workings of that disk.

Yet Travis’ eyes went from the technician’s clenched hand and what it held, back to the screen. The picture there showed a gentle wind lifting flowering branches about a tower of opal against a sky of palest rose. And the immediate future seemed at that moment more entrancing than the more distant one.

Perhaps Ashe shared that feeling at the moment. For the senior time agent moved toward the inner ladder. He paused at the well and looked back over his shoulder, to say with a strange simplicity:

“Let us go out—now.”

If there had once been a wide landing strip here, the space was long since swallowed by a cover of green. From the mass crushed by the landing of the ship came the scent of growing things, some spicy, some rank.

The humans had not worn their helmets, nor did they need to here. A sunlight no stronger than that of early summer in the temperate zone of their own world greeted them. And there was no burden of sand in the soft wind which whirled flower petals and torn leaves from the wreckage under their feet.

Now that they had a wider view than that offered by the screen, they noted other breaks in the luxuriance of growing things. The opal tower with its fantastic form was flanked by another building as strange and as far removed from the style of its companion as the desert world was from this green one. For those massive blocks of dull red, geometric in their solidity, could not have sprung from the same creative imagination—or perhaps from even the same race or age.

And beyond that was another, with knife-sharp gables and secretive windows piercing its gray walls. It had a pointed roof of some rough material, dull under the sun, and gave rootage in places to vines, even a small tree. But again it was not of the same origin as the fairylike dome or the massive blocks.

“Why—?” Ross’s head turned slowly as he looked from one of those totally dissimilar buildings to the next. All were tall, dwarfing the globe, and all had their lower stories hidden by the vegetation.

Travis thought back to a past which seemed a little blurred by all which had happened lately. There were places on his own world where a Zuñi village in miniature stood beside a Sioux lodge or an Apache wickiup.

“A museum?” He ventured the only explanation he could see.

Ashe’s face was pale under his fading tan. He stared raptly from dome to block, block to sharply accented gables. “Or else a capital where each embassy built in their home style.”

“And now it is all dead,” Travis added. For that was true. This was as deserted as the fueling port.

“Capital perhaps—of a galactic empire. What there is to be learned here! A treasure house—” Ashe was breathing fast. “We may have the treasures of a thousand worlds to uncover here.”

“And who will ever know—or care?” Ross asked. “Not that I’m not ready to go and look for them.”

Travis tensed. There was a stirring in the mass of tangled vegetation where the grounding of the globe had flattened some of the fern trees, along with others tied to them by vines. He watched that shaking of bruised and broken branches. Something alive was working its way from a point about a hundred yards away from the ship toward the wall of still-standing plants. And the fugitive thing must be fairly large by the amount of displacement its progress caused.

Had that unseen crawling thing been injured in the crash of the tree ferns? Was it now dragging itself off to die? Travis listened, striving to hear more than the rustling of the leaves. But if the thing was hurt, it made no complaint. Animal? Or—something else? Something as alien as the dune lurkers, more than animal, yet different from man as they knew men?

“It’s in cover now,” breathed Ross. “Couldn’t have been too hurt or it wouldn’t have moved so lively.”

“I think we can believe that this world isn’t as empty as it might look to the first glance,” Ashe said a little dryly. “And what about those?”

“Those” came lightly, drifting across the torn clearing caused by the descent of the globe. They flapped gossamer wings once or twice to keep air-borne, but their attention was manifestly centered on the ship.

And what were they? Birds? Insects? Flying mammals? Travis could almost believe the four small creatures were a weird combination of all three. Their long narrow wings, prismatic and close to transparent, resembled those of an insect. Yet they had bodies equipped with three legs, two smaller ones in front ending in clawshaped digits, one larger limb in back with an even more pronounced talon. Their heads seemed to be set directly on their shoulders with no visible neck. These were round at the top, narrowing to a curved beak, while their eyes—four of them!—protruded on short stalks, two in front and two in back. And their triangles of bodies were clothed in plushy fur of pale and frosted blue.

Slowly, in a solemn, silent procession, they drifted toward the ship. The second in line broke out of formation, dipped groundward. Its hind claws found anchorage on a stub of broken branch and its wings folded together above its back, resembling a butterfly on Earth.

The two last in line flapped back and forth across the open port twice and then wheeled, flew off, mounting into the sky to clear the treetops. But the leader came on, until it hung, beating wings now and then to maintain altitude, directly before the entrance of the ship.

It was impossible to read any expression in those brilliantly blue stalked eyes. But none of the four humans felt any repulsion or alarm as they had upon their encounter with the nocturnal desert people. Whatever the flyer was, they could not believe that it was either aggressive or potentially dangerous.

Renfry expressed their common reaction to the creature first:

“Funny little beggar, isn’t he? Like to see him closer. If they’re all the same as him here, we don’t have to worry.”

Why the technician should refer to the winged thing as “he” was obscure. But the creature was attractive enough to hold their interest. Ross snapped his fingers and held out his hand in welcome.

“Here, boy,” he coaxed.

Those brilliant bits of blue winked as the eye stalks moved, the wings beat, and the flyer approached the port. But not close enough for the humans to touch. It hung there, suspended in mid-air for a long moment. Then with a flurry of beating wings, sparking rainbows, it mounted skyward, its partner taking off from the brush below at the same moment to join it. A few seconds later they vanished as if they had never been.

“Do you suppose it is intelligent?” Ross watched after the vanished flyer, his disappointment mirrored on his usually impassive face.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Ashe replied. “Renfry,” he spoke to the technician, “you have your journey tape now. Can you reset it?”

“I don’t know. Wish I had a manual—at least some type of guide. Do you suppose you can find such a thing here?”

“Why are you in such a big hurry to leave, chief? We only got here and it looks like a pretty good vacation spot to me.” Ross raised his head a little to eye the dome where opal lights played under the sun’s rays.

“That is just why,” Ashe replied quietly. “There are too many temptations here.”

Travis understood. To Ashe the appeal of those waiting buildings, of the knowledge which they might contain, must be almost overpowering. They could postpone work on the ship, delay and delay, fascinated by this world and its secrets. He knew the same pull, though perhaps in a lesser degree. Before it trapped them all, they must struggle against that enveloping desire to plunge into the green jungle, slash a path to the opal dome, and see for themselves what wonders it housed.

Ashe was sorely tempted. And because he was the man he was, he must be fighting that temptation now, believing that if he once plunged wholeheartedly into exploration, he might not be able to stop. Also, Renfry was offering them an excuse to do just that by wishing for some aid in the problem of the tape.

An hour later the three of them did leave the ship, Renfry remaining in charge there. Using the lowest beam of the weapons, they cut a path into the woods. Travis picked up a flower head. Five wide petals, fluted, crinkled a little at the tips, were a deep cream in color, shading orange at the heart. Resting on his palm, those petals began to move visibly, closing until he held a bud instead of a flower. He could not toss away the blossom. Its color was too arresting, its spicy scent too appealing. He worked the short stem into one of the latches of a belt pouch, where, the heat of his hand removed, the flower opened once again. Nor did it fade or droop in spite of the shortness of its stem.

Now, out of the direct rays of the sun, the humans found the air cool, moist, heavy with the odor of luxuriant vegetation. Not that those odors were unpleasant—in fact, they were overpoweringly good. Spicy scents warred with perfumes and the sharper smell of earth as their feet scuffed through the mass of dead leaves.

“Whew!” Ross waved his hand back and forth in front of his face as if to set up a reviving current of air. “Perfume factory—or what have you! I feel as if I were burrowing through about a ton of roses!”

Ashe appeared to have lost some of his somberness since they had left the ship. “With another of carnations thrown in,” he agreed. “I think I can detect”—he sniffed and then sneezed—“some cloves and maybe a few nutmegs into the bargain.”

Travis breathed shallowly. He had welcomed the mixture of perfumes minutes earlier. Now he found himself wishing instead to face a wind with a burden of sage and piñon in place of these cloying scents in their thick abundance.

The jungle grew clear up to the base of the opaline building. And the structure itself loomed far higher from ground level than had appeared true from the port of the ship. They worked their way along, hunting the entrance which must exist somewhere, unless the inhabitants had all worn wings. Oddly enough—though there were windows in plenty of stories above, many opening on small airy balconies—the first story showed no openings at all. Here were panels set in carved frames alternating with solid blocks of the opal material. And each panel was clad in gleaming mosaic, not forming any recognized design but merely wedding color to color in vivid shades.

The humans cut their way through underbrush and reached the end of the wall. This was a large building occupying the space of a normal Terran city block. But around the corner they found the door, at the head of a curling ramp. The portal extended almost the full height of the first story and it was open, a carved archway. The frame was like frozen lace, with here a curve and there a point cracked and gone.

They hesitated. Save for the sighing of the wind, the sound of leaf against moving leaf, and some small twitters and squeaks from the unseen inhabitants of the green world surrounding the foot of the ramp, there was quiet—the quiet of the forgotten.

Ashe stepped onto the ramp, his soft-shod feet making not the slightest noise. He climbed the gentle slope almost reluctantly, as if he did not really want to know what waited within.

Travis and Ross came behind. There were pockets of dead leaves caught in the curves of the ramp, and more drifted inside the open portal. They shuffled through them, to come into a hall which was breathtaking in its height. For it went up and up, until they were dizzied when they tried to follow its inner spiral with their eyes. And covering this expanse was the great opaline dome. The sunlight shone through it, painting rainbows on walls and on the ramp which climbed in a coil along the walls, serving other lacy archways on every floor level.

Here there was none of the brilliance of the outside mosaics. The spread of color was sharply reduced to soft, faded shades, dusky violet, pallid green, dusty rosy, pale cream . . .

“ . . . forty-eight—forty-nine—fifty! Fifty doors up and down that ramp at least.” Ross kept his voice to a murmur and yet that echo of a whisper carried eerily back to them. “Where do we start?” Now his tone was definitely louder in challenge to that echo and the stillness which deadened it. Ashe left them and crossed the expanse of hall, stretching out his hands to a niche. When they hurried after him they discovered he was holding a small statuette carved of a dusky violet stone. Like the blue flyers, the subject bore baffling resemblances to living things they knew, and yet its totality was alien.

“Man?” Ross wondered. “Animal?”

“Totem? God?” Travis added out of his own knowledge and background.

“All or any,” conceded Ashe. “But it is a work of art.”

That they could all recognize, even if the subject still puzzled them. The figure was posed erect on two slender hind limbs, both of which terminated in feet of long, narrow, widely separated, clawed digits. The body, also slender but with a well-defined waist and broad shoulders, was closer to the human in general appearance, and there were two arms held aloft, as if the creature was about to leap outward into space. But it would have a better chance of survival in such a leap than those now passing the statuette from hand to hand. For the arms supported skin wing-flaps, extended on ribs not unlike those possessed by bats on Earth.

The head was the least human, almost grotesque in its ugliness to the time agents’ eyes. There were sharply pointed ears, overshadowing in their size and extension the rest of the features which were crowded together in the forepart of the face. Eyes were set deep within cavities under heavy skull ridges, the nose was simply a vertical slit above a mouth from which thin vestiges of lips curled back to display a frightening set of fangs. And yet its ugliness was not repulsive, nor horrifying. There was no clothing to suggest that it represented an intelligent being. Yet all of them were certain, the longer they examined the figure, that it had not been meant to portray an animal.

To the touch the violet stone was smooth and cool, and when Travis held it out into a patch of light from the dome, the statuette sparkled gemlike. The careful detail of the figure contrasted with the abstraction of the murals on the outer walls, more akin to the carvings on the dome and about the doorways.

Ross drew his finger along the interior of the niche where Ashe had found the image. Dust piled there dribbled out to the floor. How long had the winged one stood there undisturbed?

Ashe carried it in the crook of his arm as they went on—not up the spiral of the ramp, but into the first of the open doorways on ground level. But the room beyond was empty, lighted through slits high on the wall. They wandered on. More empty rooms, no trace of those who had once lived here—if this indeed had been a dwelling place and not a building for public use. It was as if the inhabitants had stripped it bare when they had at last withdrawn, forgetting only the little statue in the hall.

As they came from the last bare chamber, Ross sighed and leaned against the wall.

“I don’t know how you feel about it,” he announced. “But I’ve swallowed more than my share of dust this past hour or so. Also breakfast was a long time back. A coffee break right now—providing we had coffee—might be heartening.”

They didn’t have coffee, but they had come provided with the foam drink from the ship. So, sitting in a row across the ramp, they sucked in turn from containers of that and ate some of the “corn” cakes they carried for trail rations.

“Be good to have some fresh food,” Travis said wistfully. The rather monotonous diet from the ship’s stores satisfied hunger but did not appeal to his taste. He allowed himself the luxury of visualizing a sizzling steak and all that would accompany it back at the ranch.

“Maybe some on the hoof—out there.” Ross, his hands full, pointed with his chin toward the riot of greenery they could sight from their present perch. “We could go hunting . . .”

“How about that?” Travis roused and turned to Ashe eagerly. “Dare we try?”

But the older agent did not warm to the suggestion. “I wouldn’t kill—until I knew what I was killing.”

For a moment Travis did not understand, and then the meaning of the rather ambiguous statement sank in. How could they be sure that the prey was not—man! Or man’s equivalent here? But he still wanted that steak, with a longing which gnawed at him.

“Do we climb?” Ross stood up. “This’ll be an all-day job right here, if we stick to it. I’d say the cupboard’s bare, though.”

“Maybe.” Ashe cradled his bat-thing in his arm. “We can take a quick look through the ground floor of that big red block to the north.”

They fought their way through the thick wall of brush, grass, tree and vine to the monolithic building. Here again they faced an open door, this one narrow as the window slits, as if grudging any entrance at all.

“I’d say the guys who built this one didn’t like their neighbors too well,” Ross commented. “This could make a pretty good fort if you had to have one. That domed place is wide open.”

“Different peoples . . .” Travis had been a little in advance, lingering for a moment before he took the step which would bring him over the threshold. Once inside he froze.

“Trouble!” His weapon was out, ready to fire.

There was a wide hall before him, as there had been in the dome building. But where that had been clean and bare, this one was different.

A series of partitions some five or six feet high cut back and forth, chopping the floor space into a crazy quilt of oddly shaped and sized spaces, with little chance to see from one to the next. But that did not bother Travis so much as the message recorded by his nose.

The odor of the night creatures had been something like this. It was the taint of a lair—a lair long in use. It smelled of decay, alien body reek, dried and rotted vegetation, and animal matter. Something denned here and had used this place freely for a long time.

It was the eagerness of the strange hunter which betrayed it. A low, throaty murmur, such as a cat might utter when intent upon unsuspecting prey, carried across the shadows.

Travis spun around. He saw the hunched shape balancing on top of a partition, knew it was about to launch straight for him. And he pressed the firing button of the weapon as he brought it up.

The attacker was caught in mid-air. A terrible yowl of rage, and pain, echoed and re-echoed about the massive walls. A flailing limb, well provided with claws, raked across Travis’ body from the waist down, sending him reeling from the door into the greater gloom. Just then Ross and Ashe burst in, to center the full beams of their weapons on the rolling, caterwauling thing making a second attempt at Travis.

Whatever it was, the creature possessed abnormal vitality. It was not until their blast rays met and crossed in its body that it lay still. Travis scrambled to his feet, shaken. He knew that if he had not had that split second of warning, he would be dead—or so badly mauled he would have longed for death.

He limped back toward the door, his thigh and leg feeling numb from the force of that smashing stroke. But under his questing hand the fabric of the suit was untorn, and there seemed to be no open wound.

“Did it get you?” Ashe came to meet him, pushing aside his hands to look at his body. Travis, still shaken, winced under the exploring probe of the other’s fingers.

“Just bruised. What was it?”

Ross arose from a gingerly inspection of the remains. “After the blasting we gave it, your guess is as good as mine. But it is sure sudden death on six legs—and that’s no overstatement.”

The weapons had not left too much to identify, that was true. But the thing had been six-legged, furred, and carnivorous—and it was about eight feet long with fangs and claws in proportion to the size.

“Sabertooth, local variety,” Ross remarked.

Ashe nodded to the outside world. “I suggest we make a strategic withdrawal. These may be nocturnal, too, but I’d rather not tangle with another in the jungle.”

“Did you think we’d find no nasty surprises?” Rossdrummed on the mess table with his scarred hand, his eyes showing amusement, even if his lips did not curve into a smile. “Let me share with you a small drop of good common sense, fella. It’s just when things look smoothest that there’s a big trap waiting ahead on the trail.”

Travis rubbed his bruised thigh. The other’s humor grated. And since he had had time to consider the late battle, he began to suspect that he had been a little too sure of himself when he had entered the red-walled building. That didn’t make him more receptive to Ross’s implied criticism, though—or what he chose to believe was criticism.

“You know”—Renfry came in from the corridor talking to Ashe—“those blue flying things came back twice while you were gone. They flew almost up to the port, but not inside.”

Travis, recalling the claws with which those were equipped, grunted. “Might be just as well,” he commented.

“Then,” Renfry said, paying not attention to his interruption, “just before you came back I found this—inside the outer lock.”

“This” was clearly no natural curiosity left on their doorstep by some freak of the wind. Three green leaves possessing yellow ribs and veins had been pinned together with two-inch thorns into a cornucopia holder, a holder filled with oval, pale-green objects about the size of a thumbnail.

They could be fruit, seeds, a form of grain. Oddly enough, Travis was sure they were food of a sort. And plainly, too, they were an offering—a gesture of friendship—an overture on the part of the blue flyers. Why? For what purpose?

“You didn’t see a flyer leave it?” questioned Ashe.

“No. I went to the port—and there it was.”

One of the seed things had dropped out of the packet, rolled across the table. Travis put a fingertip to it and the globe promptly burst as an over-ripe grape does when pressed. Without thinking, he raised his sticky finger to his mouth. The taste was tart, yet sweet, with the fresh cleanness of mint or some similar herb.

“Now you’ve done it,” observed Ross. “Well, we can watch while you break out in purple spots, or turn all green and shrivel up.” His words were delivered in his usual amused tone, but there was a heat beneath that Travis did not understand. Unless once more Ross believed the Apache had taken too much on himself in that unthinking experiment.

“Good flavor,” he returned with stolid defiance. And deliberately he chose another, transferring it to his mouth and breaking the skin with his teeth. The berry, or seed, or whatever it was, did not satisfy his desire for fresh meat, but it was not a concentrate or something out of one of the aliens’ cans and the taste was good.

“That is enough!” Ashe swept up the leaf bag and its contents. “We’ll have no more unnecessary chances taken.”

But when Travis experienced no ill effects from his sampling, they shared out the rest of the gift at the evening meal, relishing the flavor after their weeks of the ship’s supplies.