Rite of Passage

1.

The ship was named the Juarez.

Outside, all was well. A tiny white bubble of flame played about the stern jets and the Juarez, one hundred light-years distant from the planet Earth, picked its graceful way through the system of Carinae.

Inside, it was different. The Juarez was a death ship. Someone, somehow, on one of the outer planets, had taken a chance with a germ. Perhaps he had been in a hurry, perhaps he had forgotten, perhaps it was just one of those things.

It didn’t really matter now.

The Juarez carried a crew of fifty-four. Six were still alive. Of the remaining six, three were clearly dying.

It was a long way home.

Martin Ashley wiped the cold sweat from the palms of his hands. He handed the doctor a glass of water. “Here you go, Doc,” he said quietly.

Doc Slonsky managed to control his trembling long enough to hurl the water against the wall in a gesture of supreme contempt. “A dying man asks for a drink,” he said acidly, “and you bring him water. I have told you, Martin—there is no time for jokes. Not any more.” The trembling stopped and beads of colorless sweat popped out on his forehead. “Get me a drink.”

Martin Ashley walked shakily across the dimly-lit room, picked his way between two silent, sheet-covered figures, and retrieved a half-empty bottle of bourbon from a table. It couldn’t do any harm now, he knew. When they reached that stage, nothing made any difference. He went back to the doctor, poured out a glassful, and handed it to him. Slonsky downed it at one prodigious draft, shuddered from a new cause, and managed to prop himself up on one elbow.

“Bourbon,” the little man said unhappily, “you’d give a dying man bourbon.”

“You’re not dying, Doc,” Martin told him, stuffing a pillow behind him for support. “You’re indestructible.”

“Garbage,” the doctor said, dropping the glass on the floor and taking the bottle instead. “Many men have been indestructible—Caesar, Hannibal, Bluebeard. Where are they today? Dead, all dead.” He took a long pull from the bottle.

“You’ll pull through, Doc,” Martin lied. “You’re not the same as the others, you don’t have quite the same thing, you see, and—”

“Martin.”

The room was very quiet around them. No one talks in a graveyard, Martin thought coldly. No one but the caretaker.

Slonsky let his head fall back and Martin took the bottle out of his limp hand. Slonsky closed his eyes as though the effort of keeping them open was too much for him. “Martin,” he said again, his voice very weak.

“Yes, Doc.”

“Martin, Gallen has a prayer to pull through; he passed the crisis hours ago and is still alive. He has a chance. You seem to be immune; it is because you have lived an evil life, although that particular remedy didn’t work in my case. The Chavez boy never came down either. That makes three of you, two for sure. You’d belter get the rest of us out of the ship, Martin.”

“Now, Doc—”

“Give me a drink, Martin.”

Martin Ashley put the bottle in Slonsky’s hand, but the hand didn’t respond. It was very quiet. Doc Slonsky’s eyes opened for the last time, unseeing, and Martin pulled the sheet up to cover his face.

He was alone again.

“Good luck, Doc,” he said.

He walked slowly through the silent room, not thinking about anything. He had seen it happen too many times. He was numb. He took a drink out of the bottle himself, being long past the stage where sanitary precautions concerned him. If he didn’t have it now, he wasn’t going to get it, and maybe that was too bad. The bourbon burned a little in his stomach but failed to warm him. He set the bottle down on a convenient table and left it there.

He stepped out into the corridor and closed the door behind him. He stood for a long minute, listening to the faint throbbing hum of the mindless atomics, and then he began to walk down the empty corridor, not sure where he was going, or why.

As he had so many times before when he was confused, or just lonesome, he wound up with Carol. He had carried her to her room a long time ago, when there still had been hope, and he went there now, needing a word, a look, anything.

He didn’t get it.

Her blond hair was lifeless on the pillow, and one slim arm hung down by the side of the bed, rocking slightly with the vibrations of the ship. She had no make-up on, as usual, and her blue eyes were closed. She was still breathing, faintly.

Martin Ashley looked at her for a long time. He remembered. Mostly, he remembered the long talks they had had, and the laughs, while most of the Juarez slept around them. Carol had been one of the navigators, and Martin had always thought of her as a potentially beautiful woman. She could have been beautiful, and more than that, but she didn’t let herself be. She had lost her man, a long time ago, and Martin had never been able to take his place. He had only kissed her once, and never tried again.

But they had had a closeness between them. They had understood one another, and they needed that. They had cheered each other up when they were low, and when they both felt good they had fun. They had both known that some day—

Well, some day wouldn’t come, now. Maybe it never would have anyway, but they had both liked to think that it would.

There wasn’t anything he could say to Carol. He left her where she was, because he couldn’t watch, and went out again into the empty corridor.

Martin Ashley needed life. He needed to see a living thing, even a dog or a fish or a plant. The Juarez was like a tomb. It was a tomb.

He walked through the tunnels to the senior’s cabin, listening to the click and echo of his heels on the metal floor. Long before he got there, he heard the sobbing that filled the corridor.

That would be Bob Chavez, the senior’s son, he knew. Probably, it meant that old Alberto Chavez was dead. He smiled a little, sadly. Al Chavez had only been fifty-five, twenty years older than himself, but that was old for space. He caught himself wishing that Al could have pulled through, instead of his son. He didn’t even dislike himself for the thought; he was past caring very much. It wasn’t that Bob was no good, of course, but simply that he probably wasn’t good enough.

He knocked on the door. “Come on out, Bob,” he said.

The sobbing choked off, hurriedly. His knock wasn’t answered.

“Come on, Bob,” he said tonelessly. “We’ve got work to do.”

The door opened finally. Robert Chavez was twenty-one years old and he was dark and handsome in the classic tradition. His eyes were red now, and Martin reflected idly that this was the first time he had ever seen him without his hair combed.

“Let me alone,” the boy said. “Go away.”

Martin felt sorry for him, as much as he could feel sorry for anyone today, but it obviously wouldn’t do to leave Bob in there alone with his father. “We’re all that’s left, Bob,” he said quietly, “unless you count Gallen. I know how you feel, but that won’t help. We’ve got about twelve hours at the outside to orbit this ship and pick us a planet. I need your help.”

“I don’t give a damn, Mart,” Chavez said. “I just don’t give a damn.” He started to close the door, but Martin had his foot in it. “It isn’t easy to grow up in a hurry,” he said, “but you’re going to have to do it. I’m going up to the control room, and I’ll give you fifteen minutes. You take a look at your father and figure out what you ought to do. I’m shoving off, and whether you come along or not is your business.”

He turned and walked away. It would have to be Bob, he thought. It would have to be him, of all people.

He walked toward the control room, smiling sourly.

Fifty-one down and three to go.

They had set up a cot for Ernest Gallen in the control room, by his radio equipment, just in case. When Martin Ashley came in and sat down next to him, he opened his eyes and managed to hold up two fingers in an ironic V for Victory.

“Man,” he said, “I’m still alive. How do you like that?”

“I like it fine, Ernie,” Martin said. “How do you feel?”

“Like the worms wouldn’t have me. I’m afraid I may live.”

“You’d better.”

“Who else we got, Mart?”

“The kid. Period.”

Gallen sighed. “In that case,” he said, “suppose you just pick up a gun and put a bullet through my brain, and I’ll toddle along peacefully to the happy hunting ground. No point in prolonging the agony.”

Martin Ashley looked at the man on the cot, sizing up what he knew about him. Ernie Gallen was about forty, with a short and stocky build, blondish hair and brown eyes. He was moody, and inclined to be at his most cheerful when the going was the toughest. He was—or had been—the radio expert on the Juarez, and in other fields he tended toward the “common sense” approach to problems. He had a sense of humor. Ashley liked the man, which helped. Ernie might be a good man to have along, from a purely objective viewpoint, or he might not.

That would depend on what they ran into.

“Hell of a note,” Gallen said, shifting his position on the cot. “Two guys left to run a spaceship in the middle of nowhere—an anthropologist and a radio bug. Add one kid who knows all the answers, and what have you got?”

“Not very much,” Martin Ashley admitted. “Not enough, certainly.”

The control room was silent around them, except for an occasional click or buzz from automatic equipment. The small noises served as a mechanical counterpoint to the not-sound of emptiness. The great viewer still flashed its images. The computer hummed with readiness. The dials presented their data with complete unconcern, and the lighted control bank was ready to go.

But the ship was dead. The heart and brain and spirit were not working. They were stretched out in rows, with sheets over their faces. They were cold. The ship was a corpse—fine on the outside, and all the organs still in place, but incapable of thought or action. It kept going, zombie-fashion, but it was not alive.

And the three who still lived? Martin Ashley smiled. An active thyroid gland—that was the kid. A larynx and a velum—that was Ernie. And himself?

A bit of spinal cord, maybe. And, no doubt, a dash of ego.

It wasn’t going to be a very lively corpse.

“What can we do, Mart?”

“The radio is out, I suppose?”

Ernie Gallen shrugged as well as he could from a prone position: “There should be another ship from Earth out this way in another zillion hours or so,” he said. “Conceivably, there might be an alien ship along about the same time. Until then, we can chat with the star-static. There’s nothing coming in.”

Martin Ashley grinned, deliberately keeping his mind from touching again on what had been his friends, stacked in neat white rows through the Juarez. His friends and Carol, who had been more than that. “The solution is obvious,” he said. “We just sit down and wait for a mutation to turn us into supermen. From that point, presumably, the problem will be duck soup. Neat, eh?”

Ernie Gallen groaned.

“There’s only one alternative, really,” Ashley said slowly.

“That’s one more than is visible from here,” Ernie said. “Let’s have it.”

“Well, let’s look at the facts. We’re a hundred light-years from home, and the three of us simply do not constitute an adequate crew for the Juarez. If three men—even three specialists—could handle this crate, they’d have sent out three men in the first place, and not fifty-four. We may be able to pull off some very simple and elementary type of maneuver at low speed, but trying to operate this monster in overdrive would be suicide, but fast—and no pun intended. You with me so far?”

“No argument,” agreed Gallen. “You spoke of an alternative—?”

“After a fashion. We agree that we can’t move this ship out of the Carinae system; O.K. We seem to agree also on the ugly point that there’s no practical chance of our being picked up before we’re too senile to care. So what’s left?”

Gallen essayed another shrug, and Ashley noted with alarm that the strain of talking was already beginning to wear Ernie down. When he spoke of three men, even that was something of an overstatement.

“Here’s the way I see it, then,” he said slowly. “We can either live out our lives on the Juarez, just sitting around staring at each other until we all flip our lids, or we can take the shuttle, pick us a planet, and go down and carve some sort of a life out for ourselves—or try to. Here’s another little fact for our collection: I figure that if we don’t swing the Juarez around within the next few hours, we’ll be out of the system into deep space—and I don’t know whether or not we can get it back again.”

Ernie Gallen just looked at him, unspeaking.

“If we can find a planet we can live on—and the survey showed several possibilities in that direction—we can try to orbit the Juarez around it, and take the shuttle down. That way, we can always come back if things get too rough. We can rig up a broadcast beam from the ship, telling where we are and who we are, just in case another ship should blunder out this way. That’s the only chance I see for us, Ernie. I don’t know how you feel, but I’ve only got one life to live, according to the best information available, and I don’t want to live it in this coffin. I want some grass under my feet, and some air over my head. I want a chance to be a human being, and not an animal floating around on a raft after the world’s gone bang. Excuse the speech.”

The control room was lost in emptiness, with furtive clicks and buzzes chattering in the immensity.

“What’s down there, Mart?” Ernest Gallen asked finally.

Martin Ashley shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. No broadcast waves coming in that we’ve been able to pick up, and nothing on the energy detectors. That may mean that there’s nothing there, or it may mean there’s something around that hasn’t reached a Stage Four technology, or it may mean that we’ll be up against something so different we’ll never understand it or live with it. Pick one.”

Gallen smiled weakly. “You’re not much of an ad man,” he observed.

Martin Ashley waved a hand at the steel hollowness around them. “I know what’s here,” he said quietly, “and that’s enough data for me. I’m going. If you think your chances are better on the Juarez, you’re probably right. But it’s not for me, Ernie.”

“Not for me either, Mart,” Gallen said in a low voice. “You’ll have to carry me out, though.”

They were silent then, feeling the death all around them in the Juarez. The silence was broken with startling abruptness by a furtive sound from the control room door. Martin Ashley felt the hackles on the back of his neck crawl. He turned around, half expecting to see a walking corpse.

Bob Chavez stood in the doorway. His face was very pale, his eyes very bright. He was breathing hard and fast.

“They’re all dead,” he said in a high, taut voice. “All dead but us. What’s going to happen to us?”

There was more silence.

“That,” Martin Ashley said finally, “is a very good question.”

II.

It was four “days” later.

The shuttle from the Juarez blasted uneasily through the emptiness of space toward the blue-green globe that was the fourth planet in the system of Carinae. It was a tiny ship, designed for short ship-to-planet hops, and it was out of its depth now—a slender minnow from sun-drenched shallows, caught in the center of a dark sea, and going down and down and down—

Into what?

Martin Ashley, strapped in next to Ernie Gallen, kept his eyes on Bob Chavez at the controls. He did not look out at the sucking immensity that waited for them outside the plastiglass shield. But he felt it—a yellow, burning sun, a million stars, a vastness beyond imagination. It was a measurement of the infinite and it cut man down to size. It was a mirror that reflected back to every man a true and merciless image of himself.

Looking out into space from a small ship was not a popular experience.

“Try the beam, Ernie,” he said. “It’s too quiet in here, jets or no jets.”

Ernie nodded. He was still weak, but he was stronger than he had been, and his brown eyes were clear. “You just like to hear yourself talk, Mart,” he said. He cut in the shuttle’s radio.

Martin Ashley’s voice came in out of space.

It was perma-recorded, coming from the transmitter of the empty Juarez. The Juarez was orbited about the fourth planet now, traveling in a long, silent circle through the emptiness that had been her home. There was no life on the dark Juarez, and the only sound on the ship came from Ashley’s steady flow of words into the unknown:

“THIS IS THE JUAREZ, SURVEY SHIP FROM EARTH, SEPTEMBER TWENTY, TWO THOUSAND AND SIXTY-SEVEN. UNKNOWN DISEASE HAS KILLED FIFTY-ONE OF CREW OF FIFTY-FOUR. THREE REMAINING MEN HAVE TAKEN SHUTTLE TO FOURTH PLANET, SYSTEM OF CARINAE. CONDITIONS THERE UNKNOWN. WILL MAINTAIN CONTACT WITH SHUTTLE RADIO. SURVIVORS ARE ERNEST GALLEN, RADIOMAN; ROBERT CHAVEZ, APPRENTICE PILOT; MARTIN ASHLEY, ANTHROPOLOGIST. MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL AND TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT. THIS IS THE JUAREZ, SURVEY SHIP FROM EARTH, SEPTEMBER TWENTY, TWO THOUSAND AND SIXTY-SEVEN. UNKNOWN DISEASE—”

Martin Ashley closed his eyes, remembering.

He remembered ejecting fifty-one bodies into space.

He remembered a nightmare of orbiting the massive Juarez.

He remembered Carol.

He remembered Earth—one hundred light-years away.

“That’s enough,” he said. “Turn it off.”

They were alone again, alone with the muted scream of the jets and the whispers from an endless sea.

Ahead of them, waiting, was Carinae IV. Only a name to them now, a name and a sphere of blue and green—a whole world, utterly unknown.

And three men who would have to call it home.

Bob Chavez, his face set and pale, pulled the shuttle out when they were five miles from the surface. He jockeyed the little ship down gingerly to a self-correcting altitude of one mile. The ship hissed through the atmosphere of Carinae IV, losing speed.

The portable survey equipment from the Juarez was in action, but they all looked down.

They saw great wooded tracts, soft brown under the yellow sun. They saw lush green fields, rolling away in search of the horizon. They saw emerald lakes and sparkling streams that spider-webbed across the land.

And then there were blue-black mountain ranges, their peaks dusted with cloud, that the shuttle had to rise over sharply in order to pass. And a gray desert, cut with dry canyons and fluid with driven sand. And a band of thick green—

And then the sea. An enormous sea, translucent green and flecked with white spray from long, chopping waves. A sea that seemed to go on forever, empty except for periodic outcroppings of coral islands, lightly sprinkled with green. A sea that stretched on and on, tossing fitfully, until it lost itself in darkness.

The shuttle flashed on into the night side, its scream shattering the stillness of the deserted air. The three men sat quietly, listening to the portable survey equipment clicking and buzzing as it picked up and integrated data from scanner beams and thermal radiations and movement indices, correlating them into rough ecological frameworks.

Martin Ashley had already seen enough to confirm the preliminary distance survey made by the Juarez when they had first entered the Carinae system.

There were no cities, no large concentrations of any sort, on Carinae IV. There was no detectable industry. There was no radio, no power, no technology that could register on the sensitive detectors.

But they had all seen one thing that the distance survey had missed. One thing that made all the difference.

Men.

The planet was occupied.

The shuttle stayed in the air, circling the planet. It whistled into the sunrise and hissed on toward high noon.

Martin Ashley lit up his pipe and worked his way through the survey data, adding to it from his own observations and training. His green eyes were bloodshot now, and he was going on sheer nervous energy. He was tired, but there was a question he had to answer. He read the question in the eyes of his two companions:

What kind of a world is it, this new home of ours?

He took a deep breath and clamped his pipe more firmly in his teeth. He looked down at the world slipping by under the shuttle, jungle growth now, and felt vaguely amused at his own presumption in trying to sum up a whole planet in a few well-chosen words. Planets could be tricky enough in themselves, and when they were inhabited by human beings it was a rash observer indeed who would predict dogmatically what they were like.

Human beings had a curious tendency to remain unpredictable, despite all the survey equipment and charts and figures and analyzers. Quite possibly, Martin Ashley had long ago decided, that was why they were human beings.

He took a stab at it, though. That was his job.

“It looks pretty good,” he said slowly, “if we handle ourselves right when we land. But I’ve got to warn you about something, and you’ll have to remember it if you want to stay alive down there—all I can tell you about right now is what this planet looks like on the surface. You’ve both kicked around on survey ships long enough to know that surface indications can be very misleading. There’s an example I want you to paste inside your skull somewhere; imagine yourself to be some alien observer that has come to Earth. Say you land on a beach, and there you see some old joker padding about in his shorts and getting sunburned. Let’s say that this old joker is one of the greats, taking a day off. You name him—Aristotle, Shakespeare, Einstein, Retokin. All you see is an old red man in his shorts. Maybe he looks stupid and senile. How are you going to evaluate this man, just by watching him soak up the sun? Your first impression may be very, very wrong—and if you treat our hypothetical bigwig as an ignorant lout, you may very well wake up dead in the morning.”

He blew a smoke ring at the shuttle control panel and tried to judge what effect his words were having. Hard to tell. It was so easy to make a false move in a contact situation that sometimes fantastic precautions had to be taken. And if they guessed wrong on Carinae IV, there wouldn’t be any Juarez to get them out alive.

It was strictly up to them.

“O.K.,” he said. “You’ve been watching too, and I don’t know that I can add very much to what you’ve seen. On the surface, and as far as the survey equipment can analyze, there is nothing technologically complex down there. The atmosphere and general planet-type are fine and dandy, of course, or we wouldn’t have come here from the Juarez. The planet is definitely inhabited, and evidently inhabited by human beings. As far as I can see, the people here are pretty well scattered over the planet—you could see them in the forests and on the plains and even out on those coral islands in that one big ocean. There’s one very curious thing, and I don’t quite know what to make of it yet; all the people I saw appear to have a relatively uniform material culture. I didn’t see a single group practicing really advanced agriculture, but on the other hand I didn’t see a single group without cleared crops of some sort. If the data’s been analyzed correctly, those crops all seem to be of the same general type, with specialized local varieties for differing environmental conditions. That may be very significant, or it may be just a fluke of planetary ecology—but it’s worth bearing in mind. All the groups I saw appear to practice a mixed economy—some agriculture, some hunting and fishing and gathering. The largest group we picked up contained about one hundred individuals—no really large concentrations of population. House types look crude but adequate. No energy weapons at all, so I assume these people utilize either a spear or a bow, depending on how far they’ve gotten. That’s about it, the way I see it. A rather primitive level of cultural development, as far as I can tell from here, and only one puzzling feature—the culture seems amazingly uniform all over the planet. That’s really astonishing, considering that they appear to have little or no means of long-distance communication. I can’t explain it. Any ideas?”

Ernie Gallen shrugged. “That’s not my department, Mart,” he said. “Maybe they’re all in a rut.”

“Telepaths?” suggested Bob Chavez.

Martin Ashley shrugged, puffing on his pipe. “Let’s hope not,” he said. “Learning a telepathic language is the toughest job there is, especially when you don’t happen to work that way.”

“It does sort of simplify things in a way—the uniform culture, I mean,” Gallen suggested. “At least there’s no problem of picking the right group to set down in. They’re all the same; we can just flip a coin.”

“Don’t forget Mr. Einstein on the beach,” cautioned Ashley. He was genuinely worried, but it would serve no useful purpose to upset the others now. “But Ernie’s right—I guess we might as well set her down. The preliminary survey from the Juarez showed one other possibility in this system, remember—Carinae V. But I sure don’t feel like trying that hop in this scooter unless we have to. I vote we go down.”

Ernie Gallen nodded. “Same here,” he said.

“I’ll make it unanimous then,” Bob Chavez agreed. A spark of interest burned in his dark eyes—the first sign of animation he had shown since his father’s death. “It’s really something, isn’t it?” he asked with wonder in his voice, “just think of all we know, all we’ve been through, that they haven’t even started to think about yet down there! A whole world waiting for us, a whole new world to build up for us—and maybe for our children.”

“Lord knows it could use some developing,” agreed Ernie Gallen.

Martin Ashley smiled, hiding the sick feeling that turned his stomach to ice. “Beggars can’t be too particular,” he said. “Take her down, Bob.”

The scream of the jets muted into a roaring mutter and the shuttle from the Juarez started down.

The shuttle had landed.

They could not, of course, open up the port until the air was carefully analyzed—not for basic constituents, which they already knew were O.K., but for possible disease contamination. Just because some human beings could live on Carinae IV didn’t mean that they could, without long-developed immunities.

The dead Juarez was eloquent testimony to this basic fact.

They could see, however, and they could hear. They saw a rich green field of grass all around them, stretching away into the west as far as the eye could see, and merging in the east with the soft browns and yellows and greens of a spacious forest. They heard the strange silence of land left alone—a vibrant silence compounded of a myriad of tiny sounds, of wind whispers and furtive chirpings and distant cries of unknown animals.

Carinae IV had a “day” of twenty-two Earth hours, and now the yellow sun was setting on the far horizon, settling gingerly like an elastic ball among the peaks of a blue-black mountain range. Long shadows marched silently through the sea of grass.

The air analyzers hummed gently, and evening came to Carinae IV. Even here, Martin Ashley thought, so far from home, the night still came. How many times had the night fallen on this world, and what dramas of love and hate had played themselves out on the grass fields that swayed unconcernedly around the alien shuttle from Earth? How many times would he see the night fall here—and what would the days be like that separated the nights?

This world looked peaceful, contented. A man could do a lot worse, he thought, and had done a lot worse. But how could you tell?

A volcano was pleasant enough—until it erupted. And this world was far from Earth, had never even heard of Earth.

Its standards would be different.

“Well, we can’t go out until morning,” Ernie said, sensing the thoughts that were in all their minds. “Let’s hit the sack and worry about it when the time comes.”

He tested the radio, and the message came in at once: “SHUTTLE TO FOURTH PLANET, SYSTEM OF CARINAE. CONDITIONS THERE UNKNOWN. WILL MAINTAIN CONTACT WITH SHUTTLE RADIO. SURVIVORS ARE ERNEST GALLEN, RADIOMAN; ROBERT CHAVEZ, APPRENTICE PILOT; MARTIN ASHLEY, ANTHROPOLOGIST. MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL AND TO ALL—”

He switched it off. “A good night,” he finished. “Tell the bugler to take it easy in the morning; I got sensitive ears.”

“Good night,” said Bob Chavez, lost in thought and awed again at the enormity of the thing that had happened to them.

“Good night,” said Martin Ashley. He was very tired and trying not to hope too much. He did not sleep for a long time, listening to the night sounds outside and the rustling of the breeze in the long grass.

He slept, finally, but it was a restless, uneasy sleep—the sleep of a man who knows that he is not alone.

And high overhead, an almost invisible speck of light lost in the silver glow of the solitary moon of Carinae IV, the empty Juarez floated in a slow circle among the stars.

III.

In the morning, the natives were there.

There were three of them, standing patiently in the tall green grass. They were dressed in short, togalike garments that left the arms and legs free. Two of them carried bows, and the third was armed with a metallic club of some sort. They acted neither threateningly nor fearfully.

They simply waited.

Martin Ashley looked them over carefully from the security of the shuttle, taking in the situation with a practiced eye. Bob Chavez was still new to this type of experience, and his pale face was flushed with excitement. Ernie Gallen sized them up without enthusiasm; to him, they looked pretty much like primitive peoples he had seen on any one of a dozen occupied planets.

“Hail, fellow citizens and newfound brothers,” Ernie said, determined to make the best of a situation that in no way appealed to him. “We want to be pals, so kindly point them things the other way.”

“They don’t look so bad, do they, Mart?” Bob asked.

“Not from here,” Martin Ashley agreed.

“The view from the inside of a stewpot is less flattering,” Ernie Gallen observed. “But this is your department, Mart. What do you make of them?”

Martin Ashley smiled. There were three human beings, standing in the high grass fifty yards from the ship. He had never seen them before and knew practically nothing about them. Human beings were ticklish things to evaluate, even if you knew them well. What did he make of Ernie Gallen and Bob Chavez? He wasn’t sure, and they were inside the ship.

But never mind all that, doctor. Just give us the capsule diagnosis, and if you’re wrong… well, better luck next time. If there is a next time.

He said: “There are only three of them, and unless my eyes are getting too old to tell the difference one of them looks like a woman. See—the one with the club or whatever that thing is? I could be mistaken, but they hardly look like a war party. They don’t seem angry, and they don’t seem afraid. Probably we’re something completely outside their experience, but I’m just assuming that. Unfortunately, I’m not Sherlock Holmes. I can’t look at the color of the clay on their heels and tell you their philosophy of life. There’s only one way to find out, unfortunately.”

Ernie Gallen cocked an eyebrow at him.

“I’ll just have to go out and see,” Martin Ashley said. “The air analyzers say O.K., and we’ll have to do it sooner or later.”

“I’ll go with you,” Bob Chavez offered at once.

Ashley warmed a little at that; maybe he had misjudged the kid. “Thanks, but that won’t do,” he said. “You stay here with Ernie and keep me covered. Remember: don’t shoot unless I signal I’m in trouble. And if they get me first, just get out of here and try again some place else.

“Good luck,” Ernie Gallen said.

Martin Ashley nodded and stepped into the open air lock. He closed the inner door behind him; it wasn’t necessary except for the fact that the outer door would not operate with the inner door open. He spun the heavy wheel and the outer door clicked open.

He took a deep breath and stepped out into the morning air.

The tall grass of the field was still wet with dew and the world was still chilled by the night. The sun, climbing rapidly now, was pale and just beginning to feel warm on his back.

He walked steadily, watching the three natives. He felt little emotion now; this was a job he had done many times, on many worlds. He was not visibly armed, but he had a gun inside his shirt. He didn’t want to use it, and wouldn’t use it if he could help it. But he had used it before, and would again if it were necessary. He smiled wryly.

You didn’t have to go to school to learn about survival.

The three natives watched him come, unmoving. As he came closer, he saw that one of them was unmistakably a woman. The natives had an odd pink skin color, almost the shade of salmon, that looked like a perpetual sunburn. They were handsome people, by any standards, and they looked him straight in the eye.

Ashley walked slowly. It was a long fifty yards. He kept his face utterly expressionless. He was very careful not to smile. There were no such things as “universal” gestures. On one planet a smile meant friendship, while on another it might be a bitter insult. Expressionless features were almost always a sign of neutrality, since that was the resting position of the face. It was the safest bet there was.

When he was about seven yards from them, Ashley stopped. He did nothing. He simply stood there, his hands empty at his side. He made no sound. He waited for them to make the first move.

They eyed him without fear—without even curiosity, as far as he could tell. A long sixty seconds passed. Then one of the men smiled, making Ashley feel a little silly, and put his bow on the ground. The other man promptly followed his example, and the woman put down her metallic club.

Taking no chances, Ashley took out his gun and placed it on the pile with the other weapons. The others smiled approval.

The first man said something to him, speaking slowly and softly. Testing? Ashley could not, of course, understand a word. He replied in English: “I know that we can’t understand each other yet, but I hope that understanding may come.” He smiled a little and added, “It had better come—and soon.”

The native appeared satisfied. He pointed toward the east, where the forest trees loomed up like a wall beyond the grass, made the shape of a hut in the air, and then pointed at Ashley. The meaning was clear enough—Ashley was welcome to come to the village if he so desired.

Ashley did some pointing of his own, to indicate that he wanted to go back to the ship first. The natives understood instantly. They’re not stupid, Ashley thought, and that’s for sure.

Ashley went back to the shuttle and told Bob and Ernie where he was going. He told them to give him four days and then clear out if he didn’t make it back. He shook hands with both of them and rejoined the three natives.

They picked up their weapons and Ashley picked up his, and no one bothered about them again. The first native led the way through the damp grass, with Ashley second and the other man and the woman following behind. The natives talked quietly among themselves and seemed perfectly at ease.

Martin Ashley felt the sun getting hotter on his back and tried to tell himself that the wrongness he felt was only nerves.

But he knew better.

Once contact had been made, the rest slipped easily into routine—for a while. Ashley had to constantly remind himself that this time it was different. There was no Juarez to report back to, no paper to write up about a people whose lives had intersected his for a brief few weeks and then been lost again among the stars.

This time it was for keeps.

This time the people were his people.

But routine is an insidious thing; it dulls the mind and lulls the senses with the comfort of the familiar. Martin Ashley liked his work, and did it with pride, but it was hard now to remember that it was more than a job.

It was life itself.

He got to know the village very well during the next month, while he was learning the native language as he had learned so many others in his life. There were sixteen structures in the village—fourteen rectangular log family houses built around a central plaza, a large ceremonial building in the center of the plaza, and a partially underground storage chamber for agricultural produce. Seventy people lived in the village, neatly divided into five old men, five old women, fifty persons in the young-to-middle-aged bracket, and twenty children.

The natives were friendly and helpful, and Ashley had gone back for Chavez and Gallen on the third day. They had built themselves a small log hut on the edge of the village, and they spent most of their time wandering around and waiting impatiently for Ashley to tell them what the score was. They both seemed pleased with what they saw, and they both were beginning to think that Ashley was taking everything a shade too seriously. After all, here they were in a peaceful and rather pleasant village, with plenty to eat and time on their hands. Here they were, and here they would probably stay. They had ideas and they wanted to get started on them. They were not selfish men, as men go, but they were human. They felt that they had forgotten more than the people around them had ever learned, and they wanted to help them out. Why, these natives had not even discovered the wheel—and they had landed on the planet with atomic power!

The future was wide open before them. But they waited.

And while they slept, a puzzled Martin Ashley worked far into the night—juggling columns of figures that wouldn’t add up.

The native who taught Ashley the rudiments of the language was named Rondol. He was a specialist in the native social structure, obviously a shaman among other things. Apparently, he had other capabilities as well. He was a brash man, a bit pompous, shrewd, and a good teacher. It early became clear that he was teaching Ashley a simplified form of the language of his people—scaling it down for ready comprehension.

That was unprecedented.

“I will teach you the rest when you are ready for it,” Rondol said to him, with a faintly superior air. “To understand, one must start at the beginning.”

“Drop dead, brother,” Martin Ashley said—to himself. He wasn’t getting enough sleep, and he was annoyed at his own inability to comprehend the culture in which he found himself.

On the surface, it wasn’t too complicated. The natives called themselves the Nern, which simply meant “human beings.” It was quite common for primitive peoples to name themselves in that manner, and the implication was usually obvious—no one else could be a human being, since they were not in the tribe.

It was not, Ashley reflected, a characteristic wholly restricted to primitives.

The Nern, as Ashley had already seen from the shuttle, had a simple mixed economy. They grew a single crop, a sweet tuber not unlike a potato, which they planted with digging sticks and harvested when their supply ran low. They shot several game animals with bows, mostly deerlike creatures that grazed on the great grass plains. They did some fishing in nearby streams, and they gathered a variety of fruits and vegetables that grew wild in the forest.

The Nern were monogamous, and lived in small family units. But they were very conscious of kinship ties, and the little village was divided into halves, or moieties. Each moiety was a unit in the social organization, and they worked together as a reciprocal whole. Marriage always took place between members of opposite moieties.

Nothing unusual there.

There were no clans, although the moieties had some clan characteristics. Sexes, as far as Ashley could tell, had equal rights. There was a “chief” of sorts, a charming man named Catan, but such authority as there was seemed vested in a council of elders—the ten oldest men and women. There was one shaman, Rondol, who was primarily concerned with healing and the supernatural.

Nothing unusual there.

There seemed to be a great emphasis on mythology, or even philosophy. There were many rituals, in which the whole village participated. There was the yearly cycle of ceremonies, a virtual universal among human beings. Some called them Christmas and Armistice Day and the Fourth of July, others rain dances and harvest sings and sacrifices to the sun.

Nothing unusual there.

One night, Rondol stood with Ashley in the central plaza. A cool breeze whispered in off the grass fields and sighed through the forest trees. A few orange fires crackled and hissed softly in front of the log huts of the village.

Rondol pointed up into the night, out into the infinite. “You say you came from the stars, Martin,” he said.

“Yes,” said Ashley. “From the stars, from Earth.”

Rondol smiled. “What you call stars we call campfires in the sky,” he said. “Up there are our ancestors and the never-born. The stars are our brothers.” He looked closely at Ashley. “We call them our star-brothers. Are not the stars our brothers?”

The wind murmured in from the fields of grass.

Nothing unusual there?

Martin Ashley looked up, and out.

When they had been in the village two months, they were asked to leave.

For a long time, the social life of the Nern had been “pointing” toward a single event—the initiation of two boys and two girls into adult life. As did many other peoples, the Nern symbolized crisis periods in life with rituals and ceremonies. These were the rites of passage—passage into life when you were born, passage into adulthood when childhood was done, passage into marriage, and the final passage of all when life had run its course.

Now, four Nern were ready to take their place in adult society. It would take them four days of fasting and endurance and instruction from the tribal elders. It was a precious thing in their lives.

And outsiders might offend the gods.

The Nern were very polite about it. They went out of their way to assure the men from Earth that they would be welcome again after the ceremonies. They were profuse and sincere in their apologies.

But there was no doubt that they meant business.

Ashley and Gallen and Chavez went back to the shuttle, silent and alone among the tall grass. There was nothing else they could do.

They waited.

On the fourth night, the last night of the ceremonies, they crept back through the grass to the forest to have a look. They moved quietly and spoke in whispers.

A drum throbbed hypnotically through the evening hush, and they could see the orange warmth of the fires in the village. A chant sobbed out on the moonlight, plaintive and sad and far away. The forest held its breath, absorbing the sounds of life.

Martin Ashley was lonely. He had always been a lonely man. He questioned instead of accepted, and that is a road that all men walk alone. Perhaps all men are lonely, and Ashley hid it as well as any. But Ashley was acutely aware of his loneliness, and now that Carol was gone, and with her the Juarez that had been his only home—

He shook himself. Getting morbid, he thought. Mustn’t do.

But he was looking in at life, warm life in a village one hundred light-years from Earth. And he was isolated, cut off from it. He didn’t belong. Perhaps he could never belong.

He knew, and he was not ashamed, that he would have given his soul to be in that village now, in with the drums and the songs and the firelight.

Not as a student. Just as Martin Ashley.

“They’re a funny bunch,” Ernie Gallen said. “Beating on those drums just like it was really something. Boy, we really picked us a dilly for home sweet home.”

Bob Chavez was feeling romantic. “It’s pretty, really,” he said. “Kind of simple and unspoiled. But what’s in it for us? We’ve got to show these people we mean something, got to show them a few things, carve out a place for ourselves. We’re being too careful. After all—”

Yes, thought Martin Ashley. After all, after all.

It was then that he found it.

He picked it up off the ground.

He looked at it. A white tube, four inches long. Machine-made. While he held it between his thumb and forefinger it glowed redly at its tip. A tiny wisp of smoke curled upward into the night.

“A cigarette,” he said slowly. “And better than any on Earth.”

The others stared at him.

“Looks like we’re not the only visitors this planet has had lately,” he said. “Unless—”

“Unless what?” asked Ernie Gallen.

“Unless what?”

Martin Ashley stood in the moonlight under the trees. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know.”

He listened to the lonely chant carried on the night wind and watched the orange fires glowing from far away.

Martin Ashley felt a dawning fear—and a rising excitement.

IV.

It was raining—a slow, steady rain that pattered through the trees, dripping from limb to limb, and gurgled down in a miniature river from the gabled roof of the log house.

Martin Ashley stood in the doorway, looking out. The rain was a humming sheet of silver and gray, covering the world but not hiding it. The tall, straight trees accepted the rain patiently, without much interest. The trees were very much like Earthly pines, with dripping needles and cones. They even smelled like pines, with that wet heavy fragrance that could weave synthetic memories for those unfortunates who had none of their own. Glistening village pathways wandered off among the houses, and laughing children played in the mud. The washed air was so clean it invigorated the lungs like a tonic.

Perhaps this, too, is worth something.

Martin Ashley liked the rain.

They had been with the Nern for ten weeks. Bob Chavez sat on a wooden stool in the middle of the room, quiet and depressed. Ernie Gallen, short and stocky and with his blondish hair in his eyes, paced the floor nervously. They were beginning to feel it now, Ashley knew. The isolation, the Earth forever denied them. It wasn’t an unreal picnic any longer. They felt cut off from everything that had ever mattered to them. From copters in the sun, silken women, dark hushed bars with music in the air—

The rain came down—soft, familiar rain. It was the same rain. Ashley had heard it so often—how many times? He had sworn at it while he fished, damned it at Yankee Stadium, listened to its lullaby on the tent canvas before he slept. Yes, the rain was the same.

“Look,” said Ernie finally, stopping his pacing. “We’re all in this thing together, right?”

“Sure, Ernie,” Martin Ashley said, knowing what was coming.

“Then what say we can all the cryptic references to unsolved primitive mysteries, Martin. We don’t have to take orders from you, you know. We’ve sat on our tails for nearly three months, and still no dope from you on how to proceed. Call me crude, Martin—I want a woman and a decent house and a chance to make something out of this flea-bitten place.”

There was tension in the cabin, then; the ugliness of personalities that couldn’t harmonize.

“I don’t recall giving any orders, Ernie,” Ashley said. “Just advice. Whether you care to take it or not is strictly up to you.”

“Ernie’s right though, Mart,” Bob Chavez spoke up. His voice was tired. “If we’re going to play this game, we’ve got to know the rules.”

Martin Ashley shrugged. Rules? There were no rules out here. Space was long and space was deep. Here were only brains and feelings and wind in the night. “No secrets,” he said. “I just don’t have much to tell.”

“Tell it anyway,” Ernie suggested.

Ashley took his time cleaning his pipe with a pocket knife. He loaded it with his own private blend of bourbon-soaked tobacco, which no self-respecting smoker would touch with insulated tongs, and lit it with that most efficient pipe-lighter of all, a big wooden stick match. He chose his words carefully, knowing that he wouldn’t be believed.

“In a nutshell,” he said slowly, “I think the Nern are very much more advanced than we are. I think that if we step out of line we’re going to get our fingers burned.”

Harder now, the rain beat down outside, and heavy thunder rolled in from the distant hills.

The others stared at him.

Ernie Gallen jerked his thumb at the huts in the rain. “Them? More advanced than we are? Without even the wheel? You’re nuts, Martin, just plain nuts.”

“Thank you,” Martin Ashley said.

Ernie hesitated. “I’m sorry,” he offered finally. “Didn’t mean it that way. We’re all in this together.”

“Sure,” Ashley said.

“There is the cigarette,” Bob Chavez said wearily. His face was pale. “I don’t understand that, not at all.”

Martin Ashley waved his hand. “Forget the cigarette for now. I’ve thought that one over. There isn’t any technology to speak of on this planet, unless it’s hidden in a cave or something, and that’s plain garbage. That cigarette came from some place else, which raises an interesting problem or three. But let it go for now. I wasn’t referring to the cigarette.”

“What then?” demanded Ernie irritably. “How could you possibly—?”

Martin Ashley sucked on his pipe. Where are the words? There are no words. It is like the small boy who asks, “Daddy, tell me about the stars and things. And hurry—I’ve got to go play.”

“I can’t explain it all to you,” he said, “any more than you can make me an expert radio technician in ten minutes. But I’ll try. I warn you that a lot of this is going to sound considerably more subjective than it actually is, but you’ll just have to listen and decide for yourselves.”

“Just don’t throw it too far over our heads,” Ernie said with only a trace of sarcasm. “We’ll try to catch it.”

“Look at it this way,” Ashley began. “It’s easy to count and identify the various items in a culture—a totem pole here, a spear there, a feather cape somewhere else. It isn’t even hard to pick out elements of social organization—here a clan, there the couvade, back yonder a parallel cousin taboo. Unfortunately, however, all that isn’t too important. It doesn’t tell you much that you need to know if you’re going to understand a culture. What counts is how these things are put together. Cultures are not just collections of random ideas and spear points, you see. They are dynamic, integrated systems—blueprints for living.”

“You mean like patterns?”

Martin Ashley had been expecting that one. “Think of it that way if it helps,” he said. He blew a fat, wobbling smoke ring out into the rain. “The point is this: all the ingredients are here, and they all seem simple, if a trifle idealized. But how do they hang together? What is the organizing principle? How does the thing work?”

“You tell me,” encouraged Ernie.

“I don’t know, and I’ll be the first to say so. I can’t get to first base with these people. But I’ll tell you this—this isn’t any primitive culture, and the Nern are not a primitive people. It all looks primitive, but it isn’t. Remember our friend Einstein in his shorts, getting sunburned on the beach. Maybe you’ve heard of convergent evolution—two lines of development that follow entirely different paths but come out looking alike on the surface? Well, pal, this is it, and we are right in the big fat middle of it.”

Ashley could sense the skepticism in the room.

“Hold on a minute,” he said. “I’m not through yet. I want to give you two facts to roil around inside your skulls.” He smiled pleasantly. “First, consider the contact situation. We came zooming down out of the blue in a spaceship, went right over their village, and parked out there in the grass field. A few hours later, and out come three Nern to say hello. They aren’t afraid of us, and what’s more they obviously aren’t even very interested in us. As for the ship, they hardly give it a glance. Old stuff, do you see? Standard operating procedure. Another day, another spaceship. But at the same time their village and their culture shows absolutely no traces of anything taken over from a ‘higher’ culture—no steel knives, no rifles, no plows, no fancy pants, no junk jewelry, no nothing. That’s something to chew on a while, gentlemen. Nothing spectacular, nothing that hits you in the eye, no signpost with a big MYSTERY HERE! painted on it in letters ten feet high—but how do you explain it?”

Nobody explained it.

“O.K. Second, there’s the little matter of the Nern language. For purposes of communication, they taught me—and I tried to teach you—a simplified jargon, on about the this is a book—the book is brown level. All very well—the complexity of a language tells you very little about the complexity of a culture. But the kicker is that the jargon isn’t their language! They actually have an extremely intriguing linguistic set-up that I’m just now beginning to get the drift of. Basically, they’ve got about ten different verb classes—and the type of verb you use indicates your authority for making the statement you make. That is, it tells whether your information comes from first-hand knowledge, or from a reliable authority, or from hearsay, or what-have-you. Neat, eh? This sort of thing has popped up before, of course—there was an American Indian language called Wintu that was set up along much the same lines. But the important thing is that they edited their language when they taught it to me—they revised it down to my level to make it easy for me. That just plain doesn’t happen. Explanation, please?”

He puffed smoke in a blue cloud at the ceiling.

Bob Chavez was silent and shifted uncertainly on his wooden stool. His eyes had a tired, distant look about them. The eyes bothered Ashley, vaguely. Where had he seen eyes like that before?

Ernie said, “So what? So they’re unusual. So they elude your keen scientific mind. They’re still savages, Martin, and all your books won’t change that. As for the cigarette, I say cross that bridge when we come to it—if we come to it.”

Ashley smiled. “O.K., Ernie. Just close your eyes and maybe it will all go away. You asked for my opinion and you got it. I may be wrong—I’ve been wrong before. You go play Og, Son of Fire.” He pointed, out into the wet village streets. “Go on out and tell them all about the wheel.”

Silence then, for a long time.

“Let’s don’t argue any more,” Bob Chavez said suddenly, in a voice that was fuzzy with weariness. “I… I don’t feel so good.”

Martin Ashley put down his pipe in alarm and stepped over to the kid. He looked at him, remembering now. He felt the kid’s forehead. It was icy cold. Even as his hand rested there, the heat flowed back again and the chill became a fever.

“Get to bed, Bob,” he said slowly.

Martin Ashley and Ernie Gallen stared wordlessly at each other in the gray light. There was no need to speak, and nothing to say. They both remembered the Juarez.

Outside, the rain came hammering down in dull gray sheets.

Six hours later and it was night. The driving rain had once more become a drizzle.

Bob Chavez, obviously, was dying. He was unconscious now, and did not stir on his bed. His face was alternately too pale and flushed red with blood.

The disease had struck again. They had found the planet safe as far as they could tell, and that probably meant that they had carried the disease with them from the Juarez. It had waited, dormant, biding its time.

And now—

And now it had come back, in a little cabin on a new world. Bob was very sick, which was bad enough, but that wasn’t all. Martin Ashley and Ernie Gallen had exchanged no words, but they both knew. Each man could already feel the symptoms in himself. Gallen had had the disease once, and Ashley had watched fifty-one people die of it.

He remembered: Fifty-one down and three to go.

“It’s faster this time,” Ernie said, breaking the long silence. “A lot faster.” He sat down on his bed and wiped the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief.

The rain pattered gently on the roof, eternal and unconcerned.

Martin Ashley licked lips that were suddenly dry and parched. He felt his blood pounding through his veins, heavy and sluggish and sick. He listened to Bob Chavez, breathing in short, harsh gasps in the darkness. So quickly, then, did death come in and win all arguments—

The night was slow and very long.

An hour passed. Without a word, Martin Ashley went over and picked up Bob Chavez in his arms.

“What are you doing?”

“Going for a walk.”

“In the rain?”

“I’m taking the kid to see a doctor.” His brain was spinning now, and it was hard to hold on to it.

Ernie Gallen surged weakly to his feet. “You crazy fool—to that witch doctor?”

“He got his M.D. at Johns Hopkins,” Ashley said, feeling giddy.

“You’re crazy! I won’t let you do it.”

“He can only die, Ernie.”

“I won’t let you!”

Martin Ashley smiled slowly. His mind, suddenly, was crystal clear. Calmly, he, put the kid back on the bed. “Ernie,” he said, “if we don’t get out of this, I want you to remember one thing: you give me a pain.”

He moved in fast, on dancing feet. He swung just once, his fist coming up in a long arc almost from the floor. It had every ounce of Ashley’s strength behind it, and it landed with a crunch on the point of Gallen’s jaw.

Ashley didn’t even look at him. He picked Bob Chavez up again and staggered out into the drizzle and the darkness. The kid was terrifically heavy, like a lead sack in his arms. His feet slipped and sloshed in the mud and his hair plastered itself down over his eyes.

The fever was getting him now. He was burning up. Insanely, he wondered why the drops of rain on his forehead didn’t boil away into steam. He couldn’t think clearly and his feet got all tangled up when he tried to walk.

He fell twice, and the mud felt cool.

Where was the Juarez now, he wondered, out there beyond the rain? He thought he could hear it: “THIS IS THE JUAREZ, SURVEY SHIP FROM EARTH, SEPTEMBER TWENTY, TWO THOUSAND AND SIXTY-SEVEN. UNKNOWN DISEASE HAS KILLED FIFTY-ONE OF FIFTY-FOUR. THREE REMAINING MEN HAVE TAKEN SHUTTLE TO FOURTH PLANET, SYSTEM OF CARINAE. CONDITIONS THERE UNKNOWN—”

He began to laugh. He heard himself, and stopped.

He saw the dark structure before him and fell through the door of Rondol’s cabin. He twisted as he fell, breaking the kid’s fall with his body.

“Sick,” he said from a thick, oily blackness. “Sick. Needs a doctor—”

From somewhere, from nowhere, strong hands touched his shoulder, and he knew nothing more. There was only the rain, the warm and soothing rain, forever.

V.

Martin Ashley woke up.

The sky was over his head and it was a brilliant, astonishing blue. He lay very still, not trying to move, just looking at it, drinking it in. The air around him was warm and clean and filled with the sharp sweetness of pine.

He was well. He knew that instantly; no trace of disease was left in his body. Very vaguely, he seemed to remember long chants and singing and herbs in his mouth. But all of that was long ago, and now there was only the blue sky, and the lazy delight in just being alive.

He glanced to one side, and there was Bob Chavez. Like himself, he was lying on a bed of leaves, covered with a light blanket. His face was clear, his eyes unclouded, and he was smiling weakly.

“Tell ’em about the wheel,” Bob Chavez whispered.

Ashley smiled back at him. He tried to think, but the effort didn’t seem worth the trouble. He relaxed and let the soft air wash over him as he drowsed.

“Feeling better? ” asked a voice out of a great distance.

He opened his eyes again. It was evening. Rondol was crouching by his side. The shaman had lost much of his earlier brashness, and now seemed almost gentle.

“Much better,” he said sleepily. “Thank you, Rondol.”

Rondol frowned. “The other one,” he said, “the one who was always so certain about things—”

“Ernie?”

“Yes. He would not let me help him: I went to him as soon as I found the nature of your trouble. We started to sing him well, to call on the good forces to assist him, but he cursed us and demanded that we leave.” Rondol shrugged. “We left. He is dead. We have disposed of the body.”

Dead. Fifty-four had boarded the JUAREZ, and now two were left.

Martin Ashley was still foggy with sleep. Undoubtedly, he thought, he had been drugged. Rondol’s voice drifted down to him from a great and misty height.

“Soon now you will leave us, Martin. We have studied you enough; we would not endanger your lives further and have you think badly of us.”

Studied us? Studied US?

He tried to think, but he was too tired. It was good just to lie quietly, listening to the wind and the sounds of the coming night. He slept.

It was morning when he opened his eyes again—a bright, clear morning that hurt his eyes. And the morning was filled with sound—a thundering, splitting crack that swept down from the skies and reverberated through the hard-packed village streets. He caught a glimpse of it, silver in the sun, flashing high above the trees in a deceleration orbit.

A spaceship.

And a big one.

The ship stood on her tail and came down. Martin Ashley watched it lose altitude, hanging in the air like a skilled swimmer treading water, until the tall pinelike trees hid it from view.

A whining hum continued for a long minute, and then the silence came again, even louder in his ears. The world rushed in to fill the emptiness, with whispers of wind and trickles of water rushing over rocks and murmurs of village life.

The ship had landed—obviously out in the grass field, near the empty shuttle from the Juarez.

Rondol helped Ashley to his feet, and kept a hand on his shoulder to steady him. Catan himself, the “chief” of the Nern, assisted Bob Chavez. A girl, whose name was Lirad, led the way out of the village and down the pathway under the trees.

Still a little confused and uncertain about what was happening, Martin Ashley turned once, back to the village of the Nern, to bid it a silent farewell. At his side, Rondol seemed about to speak, but said nothing.

Unbelievably, they were leaving. Going where? Going where?

They walked along under the pines until the forest ended and the field of tall grass was before them. There in the sun rested the mighty spaceship that he had seen as a silver speck in the air, and beyond it lay the shuttle that had carried them to Carinae IV. The shuttle was dwarfed into insignificance by the towering giant, that dominated the field.

The three Nern eyed the great ship with neither envy nor curiosity. Ashley watched them closely. There was, he decided, a certain affection in their eyes, but that was all. As a man might look back on the well-remembered toys of yesterday’s childhood.

“They are more of our star-brothers,” Catan said quietly. “Do not fear them. They will take you to your homes.”

Martin Ashley started. Everything was happening so fast that he could not organize his thoughts. He had given up the Earth as forever beyond his reach, and now suddenly Catan spoke of home. Ashley felt conflicting emotions chase themselves through his brain, and he tried desperately to say something—something for which he knew no words, in any language. He felt that he had caught a glimpse, a mere suggestion, of something fine—and now it was to be taken from him, and he was free to go home.

He said nothing, because he did not know how. Bob Chavez, too, was silent at his side.

“We will miss you, Martin,” Rondol said. “You are a good man.”

And then the girl, Lirad, was before him. She was not beautiful by ordinary standards, but her dark hair framed the most sensitive face that Ashley had ever seen—sensitive and at the same time firm with strength and humor. Why had he never noticed her before? Gently, she touched his shoulder with her hand. She looked deep into his eyes, smiled faintly, and said nothing.

So few words, so little time remaining now. But Ashley knew that something had passed between himself and the Nern, something new, something that was his if he could just reach out and grasp it.

Too late.

Two men, crisp and uniformed and efficient, came out of the ship, exchanged friendly greetings with the Nern, and took charge of the two men from Earth. Carefully, they led them through the field of grass and up into the ship that towered into the heavens.

The sun was gone, and the village, and the pines. Now, again, there were the metals and the machines and the hummings and buzzings and clickings. And the alert faces, the ordered activities, the jokes and the skills of men in uniforms.

“Welcome aboard, gentlemen,” said the captain, speaking to them in the language of the Nern. “Make yourself at home.”

The cushioned take-off and the smoothly compensating gravity pull told Martin Ashley that here was a ship that made the old Juarez look like a crude experiment, a toy for the Fourth of July.

“Tell them about the wheel!” enthused Bob Chavez, his face alive with pleasure.

Martin Ashley smiled back, still trying to organize his thoughts. It had all happened so quickly—

He knew only that he was in space again, and the Nern were gone.

One “day” later they landed on Carinae V.

They stepped out into an enormous concrete spaceport, the biggest that either of them had ever seen, with green gardens on top of the walls and the towers of a white and gleaming city sparkling in the sun beyond.

“This, I believe, was the planet that had no technology,” Bob Chavez said wryly. “Looks like our initial survey made a slight miscalculation.”

“They did indicate two planets that seemed ecologically O.K., if you’ll remember,” Ashley pointed out. “But they seem to have gotten their decimal point in the wrong place. In fact, they didn’t even have a decimal point.”

It was all very swift and very courteous. A smooth, fast copter picked them up and flashed into the city, depositing them on a tower roof. A silent elevator plunged them down into the depths of the building and let them out on the twenty-fifth floor. The door opened directly into a large office—cool and tasteful, with remarkable paintings on the walls and a window that looked out on a roof garden that was a riot of color.

A man got up quickly from behind a desk and came toward them, hand outstretched in true Earth-fashion. He was a big man, well over six feet tall and weighing an easy two hundred pounds, with unruly brown hair, sloppy clothes, and open, friendly eyes.

“Very happy to have you with us,” he boomed in flawless English, his big voice filling the big room. “Very happy indeed! Smoke? Drink?” He laughed, and his laugh was as big as he was. “Sit down.”

Martin Ashley sat. He was still a little weak, and beginning to feel painfully like a small and rather stupid child. The big man’s personality was like a blow in the face, but Ashley liked the man on sight. To cover his nervousness, he fished out his pipe, took his time loading it, and lit it with a stick match.

“My name is Shek,” the big man said. He shook out a cigarette, and one mystery was solved. It was identical to the one that Ashley had found that night, so long ago, outside the village of the Nern. It puffed into a spark as Shek held it in his fingers, and he promptly hung it miraculously in the corner of his mouth and went on talking. “Name sounds moronic I know, but Martin Ashley is a howl too, or would be if you were me.”

Shek paced the floor, puffing up clouds of smoke which the air conditioner valiantly tried to blow out the window. He had plenty of room to pace in, and he needed it. “Look here,” Shek said, “I know what you guys must be thinking, so let’s get the questions out of the way so we can enjoy ourselves.” He jabbed a big finger at Martin Ashley. “Matter of fact, you already know the answers, if you’ll just get up on your hind legs and dredge ’em up.”

Ashley smiled dubiously and concentrated on his pipe.

“I’ll show you,” Shek said. “I’ll ask the questions. One, How come you didn’t pick us up on the Juarez survey?”

Ashley hesitated. “You’re screened, I guess,” he said.

“Of course! Only possible answer. See—you know more than you thought you knew already. Long story, and probably very dull to you, but the upshot of it is that we prefer to contact others instead of having strangers barge in on us all the time.” He slammed his fist into his hand with a resounding whack. “You’ve no idea the creeps there are blatting around in space, present company excluded of course. Why, would you believe it, one crummy outfit came down here before we had the screen set up and tried to colonize the joint!”

He boomed his big laugh again, and Martin Ashley felt a bit uncomfortable. That shot had come just a trifle too close to home.

“Yes, sir,” Shek hurricaned on, shooting off words like strings of firecrackers. “Next question: How did we know where you were, and when to pick you up?”

“Well, you could have picked up the message from the Juarez,” suggested Bob Chavez.

“Or the Nern got in touch with you somehow,” Ashley added. He was feeling a little better and essayed a smoke ring that wobbled across the room and out the window.

“Nice smoke ring!” complimented Shek. He blew one himself and beamed proudly. “Both of your answers are right, of course. We picked up the message from the Juarez right away, and we knew you’d be O.K. if you didn’t pull anything stupid. Then Rondol gave us a buzz.”

“How?” asked Ashley, beginning to feel dumb again.

“Usual way,” Shek laughed, still pacing up and down, trailing smoke. “We do a little… ummm…trading with Rondol and the boys, you see, and we have to contact them occasionally. So there’s a good transmitter down there—Rondol’s is in the club house in the middle of the plaza; I don’t guess you got in there.”

Ashley shook his head.

“You’re doing fine,” Shek assured them. “Next question: How about my English? Good, huh? ” He grinned boyishly.

“It’s not only good, it’s fantastic,” agreed Ashley. “I guess you got it from Rondol, but I didn’t even know he was learning my language while he was teaching me his.”

Shek inhaled another cigarette. “Sure. Smart cookie, Rondol! He sort of picks things up, you see. Best doctor in the system, too. You gentlemen were lucky.”

“We know.”

“Well,” boomed Shek, “so much for the inevitable questions. I told you that you knew all the answers before we started!”

Knew all the answers? I hardly knew the questions!

“Here’s the deal,” Shek told them. His idiomatic English was so absolutely flawless that it was hard to believe that it was not his native tongue. And he had learned it in a few short months. Martin Ashley was almost beyond amazement. If Shek had suddenly sprouted wheels and roared off down the hallway, he probably wouldn’t have flickered an eyelid. “We’ve got a ship going to Centauri the day after tomorrow,” Shek said. “We’ve made it a point so far to avoid Earth shipping, but that’s your ride home. We’ll leave you there and you’ll be picked up in a matter of a few days, I would imagine. Lot of traffic out that way.”

“Home,” said Bob Chavez slowly. “I’m really going home.”

Martin Ashley smoked his pipe and said nothing.

The interview, if such it could properly be called, wore on until long afternoon shadows began to filter down into the vast canyons between the white towers. Martin Ashley felt himself gradually relaxing. The big man was a comfortable sort to be around; he was one of the few men of his type that Ashley had known who was neither a phony nor an ass; Shek really was frank and good-natured, and it was a stupid man indeed who failed to catch the glint of sharp intelligence in his eyes.

Martin Ashley relaxed—and that meant that he could think again. It wasn’t a brooding kind of thought that made him perpetually occupied with Big Problems, which were usually far more ridiculous than many of the “little” problems that all people faced just in the course of growing up and staying alive, but rather a keen curiosity that operated almost on a subconscious level, periodically stepping forward to demand his attention. He had been asking questions ever since he learned how to talk, and for better or for worse it was far too late to stop now.

“It’s so astonishing,” Bob Chavez was saying, shaking his head. “All this, I mean. A few hours ago we were in the middle of nowhere, cut off forever from home and people like ourselves, and now here we are—in this fabulous city, comfortable, and with a ticket for home in our pockets.”

Martin Ashley changed the subject; they had, he figured, about wrung that one dry. “How long have you been in contact with the Nern?” he asked slowly.

Shek smiled. “It’s been a long, long time,” he said. “Not just the Nern, but all the other peoples on Carinae Four. We’ve been in contact for thousands of years. You might say that we sort of grew up together.”

Ashley eyed Shek and asked the question that he had been framing for the past fifteen minutes. It wasn’t worded as a question, but he knew that Shek would catch its import. “You have been remarkably restrained and wise,” he suggested, “in not interfering with their culture. I could see no signs at all that you had tried to make it over in your model, and it must have been a powerful temptation—so close to you, and such a large potential market. Your hands-off policy is practically unique for a culture as highly developed as this one.”

Shek laughed his big booming laugh and stuck another cigarette into the corner of his mouth. “Ashley,” he said, “you know better than that. The fact is that they have been remarkably decent to let us go on our own way as best, we could.” He shook his head. “Believe me, it would be utterly fantastic for us even to consider fooling around with the Nern culture—that’s a fast short-cut to oblivion.” He stabbed his finger at Ashley. “We’re not trying to teach them anything—we’re trying to learn!”

Martin Ashley smiled with a certain inner satisfaction.

He had known the answer to that question in advance, too.

VI.

It was the next evening, and the lifting of the ship for far Centauri was only fifteen hours away.

Martin Ashley had left Bob Chavez at the spaceport and had more or less invited himself out to Shek’s country home. It hadn’t been very difficult, actually, since the two men had taken an immediate liking to each other.

It was a charming home, set in a landscaped square of grass and flowers. Shek’s wife was just the opposite of her husband, at least on the surface—she was cool, poised, and unobtrusive. The couple had two small children, both girls, who proceeded to chase each other around the living room until they were made to go stand in the corner by their mother. Ashley was vastly amused by the punishment meted out to them—it seemed that methods of disciplining children didn’t change very much even across the gulf of light-years.

Only Shek could speak English, of course, so Ashley had to let smiles and nods do his talking for him. He had a tall cool drink in his hand, which Shek had made with more care than Ashley ever expended on his own drinks, and he experienced a curious duality of feeling that he had known many times before. At once, he was both an outsider and a family friend. He liked it here, and felt that he was liked in return, but somehow he didn’t fit. He was honest with himself about it: he envied Shek his life, and yet he knew that he could never live that way.

“Shek,” he said finally, “there’s some information I’ve got to have, and I’ve come to you to get it. I’ve very little time left now, and I want you to help me fit some pieces together.”

“I’ll try,” Shek agreed readily. The big man was more subdued in his home than he was in his office, and his thoughtful side was much more in evidence. “Shoot.”

Martin Ashley sipped his drink, which was delicious. “Ever since I left the Juarez and headed down for Carinae Four,” he said, “I’ve been sniffing around like an ape at a power generator. I knew there was something utterly out of the ordinary about that planet from the very first, but that’s no answer—it’s just a problem. I saw right away that the Nern were not so simple as they seemed, and I tried to act always on the assumption that they were not primitive, no matter how they looked on the outside. I knew I was right, and you confirmed that for me yesterday when you told us, in effect, that they were way ahead of you, just as you are way ahead of us—”

Shek raised his hand, objecting. “Let’s just say different,” he said. “Or more complex along certain lines. This business of being ‘advanced’ is a pretty subjective thing, in my opinion.”

“Correction noted,” agreed Ashley readily. “But we won’t try to solve that particular problem tonight. But here’s the point, Shek: I know what the Nern are not and I have for a long time. But I don’t know a blessed thing about what they are.” He paused. “Shek, I’ve got to know. Don’t ask me why.”

Shek eyed him carefully. “I guess you do, at that,” he said. “Of course, I can’t pretend to tell you the inside story because I don’t know it all, either. I can give you the general picture, that’s all.”

“That’ll be plenty,” Ashley assured him.

“O.K., Martin. Here, let me fill up your glass again. This will take a little time.”

Martin Ashley leaned forward, hoping that he did not look as excited as he felt.

This was the story Shek told, while the evening shadows marched in steady shadow files on into night.

Man, wherever he is found, is a strange and much misunderstood animal. It was not so much man’s famous “better brain” that made the difference, although he had that, too. Rather, it was his ability to symbolize and thus to be a carrier of culture. The growing totality of culture was passed on from generation to generation, and individuals were born into functioning systems that they themselves had done little or nothing to bring into being.

Each new person did not think up for himself the ideas of cooking food or playing football or using electricity—he just did them “naturally,” because “everybody did it that way.”

Now, culture is a learned process, which must be taught and absorbed, which is why human children are “helpless” for so long and why they must spend almost half of their lives going to school in one form or another.

As cultures developed, a knotty question appeared: What happens when the culture is so complicated that one person can’t possibly learn it all?

Technological processes snowballed whenever they were set in motion, and when technology changed so did the rest of culture. Cultures ballooned—from cave-dwellers to villages to mammoth cities, from stories told around campfires to libraries filled with so many books that it took a special staff just to keep track of them all.

There was too much to learn. What was the solution?

One way out, the way unconsciously selected by Earth and by the people of Carinae V, was to learn a small core of culture and then specialize with increasing minuteness in a technical field. The results were sometimes painful: scientists who neither knew nor cared about the effects of what they did in their labs, soldiers who fought without knowing why, governments that legislated in mental darkness, writers who wrote glibly about problems which they were incompetent to understand. Men learned and learned and worked and worked and piled up more and more for the next generation to wrestle with—and for what?

For fun, and for an old-age pension that they never learned how to enjoy.

There was another solution, and the Nern had taken it long ago. They edited their culture down to essentials, and learned to live in it.

The very concept of editing a culture assumed an awareness of what culture was—a learned process, the result of arbitrary history, and not an instinctive “right way to do things,” as opposed to all other ways, which were wrong. Getting this idea across to a population was the biggest hurdle to be faced, and when it was done the rest was relatively easy. The Nern handled their indoctrination in what appeared to be a rite of passage, an initiation ceremony for children. It was, indeed, an initiation—the children had been brought up to cherish the ideals and beliefs of their culture, and now they were told and shown that these ways of living were arbitrary and could be changed. This did not mean that they were no longer to value them—but only that they must be critical of what they valued, and capable of rational evaluation.

There was another problem, or rather two problems. What was essential, and essential for what?

The Nern took as their goal the value of survival with maximum integration, cohesiveness of function, individual fulfillment, constant challenge, and peace. It was no Utopia, of course—this was a real culture, with real human beings in it, with real hopes and fears and sorrows.

They were not helpless, not even after they had decided against a machine culture multiplied forever. They really knew culture, which was man’s most distinctive possession. They were masters of the culture process—they knew what seeds to sow in other cultures to produce almost any desired result. They knew the pivotal points of cultures—they could, at a distance, through psychology and hypnosis and adroit cultural appeals, turn an enemy into an ally or tear it apart with civil war.

They had found the true “uncharted corridors of the mind,” and they had explored them thoroughly.

On the surface, as Ashley had observed, there was a surprisingly uniform planetary culture, with a mixed economy and only the simplest sort of tools. There were shamans and rituals and moiety-type social organizations. There was an elaborate series of myths about the star-brothers, with their campfires in the sky.

But underneath it was different. Very different. Under the surface of that “uniform” planetary culture was tremendous cultural diversity. Each group was unique in the way the elements were put together, in the dominant values by which the culture lived. The hunting and gathering and fishing and limited agriculture served to tie the people to their land, and make them appreciate it, in the absence of a market economy. They had found machines to be useful, and certainly not “bad,” but they had found that machines carried a price tag which they could not afford.

One solution to a specialized system was to build robots; another was to eliminate the useless jobs entirely. Their crops were non-tedious in nature, requiring very little time and yielding a large return. At the same time, when you ate a meal you knew where it came from and did not take it for granted. The shamans were genuine doctors; they combined advanced psychosomatic medicine with “herbs” similar to natural wonder drugs and sound surgical techniques, and they kept the chants and the singing so as to avoid divorcing science and religion. The rituals restated the values of the culture, and were regarded as both good fun and as efficient structuring devices for the society. The attitude toward them was not unlike that found in America toward Santa Claus—something which only the children believed in literally, but which all the adults could appreciate and participate in. Their dual division of society was a nicely integrated system that provided a framework for sports and games and dancing contests, and their preferred marriage systems were quite workable forms of social insurance. Their language was designed to emphasize cultural tolerance and objectivity. And who could be pressed for time, when it was all the same day, repeating itself forever?

It was not a perfect system, and they knew it. It changed all the time, and its people were human enough to foul things up now and then. But it was a try, a way of doing things, and whether it was better or worse than other ways depended pretty much on how the observer felt about such things.

The Nern had substituted philosophy and songs and dancing for books, and their philosophy was only simple on the surface. The stars were their brothers, because they had sensed a genuine unity of all life everywhere; it was all related because it was all the same process, and to the Nern that was kinship.

And there was the sun, and the trees, and the sounds of happy people. Perhaps, in a way, that was the best of all. The population was small, only some four million people on the whole planet, but they did not place their value in numbers.

“That’s what I know about the Nern,” Shek finished, putting down his cigarette which promptly went out. “And now it’s very late. Come along, Martin, and spend the night with us. I’ll drop you off at the spaceport in the morning.”

“Very kind of you, Shek,” Ashley said. “Thanks.”

He had a room on the second floor, a room with a window open to the cool night air. He lay awake for a long time that night, looking out at the stars, the star-brothers, the ancestral dead and the never-born, sitting around their campfires in the sky—

It was dawn when he slept.

The great gray ship that was bound for far Centauri, one hundred light-years away, pointed her slim snout at the noonday sun and waited.

Martin Ashley had had two tough decisions to make, and he had made them both. He stood with Bob Chavez at the lock elevator, waiting for it to go up and into the ship. The ship towered over his head, a metal giant, pointing.

Quite suddenly, the Earth seemed very near.

“Good-by, Bob,” he said, holding out his hand.

Bob Chavez shook it firmly, and he made no attempt to argue with Ashley about the decision that he had made. Funny what a few months will do to a boy, Ashley thought. Bob has become a man.

He would miss him.

“Best of luck, Mart,” Chavez said. “Sorry I was such a brat at first.”

“You were good company,” Martin Ashley said. “Perhaps one day we’ll meet again.”

“Perhaps. I hope so. I’ll tell Earth you said hello.”

A light flashed and the elevator lifted. Bob Chavez was gone.

Old Alberto Chavez would be proud of his son now, but he would never know. Martin Ashley smiled a little. Fifty-three down and one to go.

He turned and walked away from the great gray ship, the sun in his eyes. He was very much alone. He walked as fast as he could, and he did not look back.

One week later, Martin Ashley was in space again.

The big ship from Carinae V had maneuvered with rare skill to pace the empty hulk of the Juarez, still circling in its endless satellite orbit about the planet of the Nern.

In a wonderfully light and flexible spacesuit, Martin Ashley pushed himself across to the ship that had been his home. Shek went with him, and they went through the emergency lock together.

There were still enough lights on in the Juarez so that they could see, but somehow they just made the gloom worse. There is nothing more depressing than a dead ship, and the Juarez was dead. There was nothing left now but one mechanical voice, and ghost memories of the dead and the darkness prowled through the hollow rooms and passageways.

In the silent control room, Ashley flicked on a ship amplifier. The message still came, endlessly repeating from the recording, sending Ashley’s own words of a lifetime ago drifting into space:

“THIS IS THE JUAREZ, SURVEY SHIP FROM EARTH, SEPTEMBER TWENTY, TWO THOUSAND AND SIXTY-SEVEN… SHUTTLE TO FOURTH PLANET, SYSTEM OF CARINAE… WILL MAINTAIN CONTACT… SURVIVORS ARE ERNEST GALLEN, RADIOMAN; ROBERT CHAVEZ, APPRENTICE PILOT; MARTIN ASHLEY, ANTHROPOLOGIST. MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL… THIS IS THE JUAREZ.”

Martin Ashley canceled the message and turned off the transmitter. There was no need for it now, with Ernie dead and Bob Chavez on his way back home.

The last voice of the Juarez was stilled, and neither Martin Ashley nor Shek broke the silence.

They turned out all the lights and went back to their waiting ship.

The ship flashed on—toward Carinae IV.

“In a way, I envy you, Mart,” Shek said, “but it’s not for me.”

“It’s funny,” Ashley told him, “but that’s just what I thought at your house.”

“I’ll be down to see you, sometime. Sometime soon.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

And the great ship landed—in a sea of grass, beside a tiny shuttle that stood alone, an alien statue in the fields of night. Martin Ashley stepped outside, into the darkness, and moments later the ship from Carinae V lifted away into the great sea of space with a whine and a roar.

Martin Ashley trembled. For all of his life, he had been a man in search of something without a name. The search had taken him into schools and across the light-years, and once, with Carol, he had almost found it. And now, after so long—

He was too old and had lived too deeply to believe that he had found it at last. Perhaps men never found it, and that was the secret that kept them going. But there was a chance now.

A chance.

The ship was gone, and there was the silence again, the silence of night and of land left alone.

Martin Ashley shivered.

He knew that the others were watching.

They came out of the shadows where they had been waiting for him—Rondol, Catan and the woman, Lirad. Lirad smiled and took his hand.

“Welcome, my son,” Catan said. “We have been expecting you.”

Hesitantly, Martin Ashley said, “I think I know about Bob. You… sent… him back to Earth, didn’t you?”

Rondol nodded. “Your people are young and very aggressive,” he said. “They found us once, and will again. We planted only a very small seed in your young friend—a seed that will flower just enough so that your people will be willing to listen and co-operate when next they come our way. You or your sons can talk to them, and we can be friends instead of enemies. Your friend wanted to go home anyway, you know; we did not harm him.”

“I let him go,” Ashley said slowly. “And myself? I must know that. I know that you will not lie to me.”

“We did nothing to you, Martin,” Rondol told him. “You were one of us from the beginning; you have always been one of us. Your decision was one of free will, at least inasmuch as any man ever has free will.”

“Let’s go, then,” Martin Ashley said. “I’m ready.”

He heard it before he saw it, as they walked along the pathway beneath the pines. Drums, and chanting voices in the night. And then he saw them waiting—the orange fires burning in the village of the Nern.

He had seen it all before, a long time ago, with Ernie and Bob, hidden in this same forest.

The rite of passage, the initiation ceremony during which the child passed into adulthood.

This time, he knew, it was for him.

He held Lirad’s hand, tightly.

With a greater humility than he had ever known, and with a pride that burned like fire within him, he walked forward, toward the drums and the singing and the people who were waiting to take him in.

He looked up once. There they were, untold millions of them, his star-brothers, the old ones and the never-born, sparkling in the sky.

They smiled, understanding.

He walked on, shoulders squared, into the village.

Rite of Passage

by Chad Oliver

An A\NN/A Preservation Edition.
Notes

1.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

The End.

Notes and proofing history

Rite of Passage

by Chad Oliver

An A\NN/A Preservation Edition. Notes

1.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

The End.

Notes and proofing history

An A\NN/A Preservation Edition.
Notes