"Ahhhhh," sighed the young men at the table.
"You are called?" asked Kleeper. "We had hopedthat you would be our honored guest for afestival.The young women are working, even now."
"There is no haste," Pat said. Well, that's whatthe fellow had said.
"Splendid," Kleeper said, clapping his hands.All the young men rose. Gorben, apparently, hadbeen appointed, or self-appointed, as Pat's guide and companion. He led Pat into the village square.Upon Pat's emergence from the cabin a band—odd-looking instruments, but sounding familiar, strings, drums, woodwinds, brass—began a sprightly melody and a dozen very pretty blond girls in shortembroidered skirts and white blouses danced in perfect unison.
Something had been nagging at Pat. It crystallized in his mind as he sat in a place of honor and watched the dances of the girls, the semimilitaryposturings of the young men. He was in a primitive village, on a primitive planet. Bread was bakedin mud ovens. The cabins were heated by wood burned in a fireplace, and lit by lamps which usedanimal oil as a fuel. Water was drawn by windlassfrom a community deep well. The sanitary facilities consisted of privies built from rough, unpaintedplanks. And yet the people seemed to be uniformlyhealthy. And they were all much too uniformlybeautiful. And where were the children? Only afew, not more than a half-dozen, ranging in agefrom a babe in arms to a young girl in her earlyteens, were in the square.
When the dancing ended, the impromptu festival over, Pat told Gorben that he wanted to walk.Gorben offered to accompany him. Pat nodded.They walked the road to the next village, wherePat found similar conditions. Apparently, his presence was known, for the people of the village wereout en masse to bow low, some to fall on theirfaces in worship.
As the hour grew late, he walked with Gorbenback to Gorben's village. "I will stay here tonight,"he said. He'd been thinking about that voice onthe communicator. If they wanted him before hechose to go to the temple, which he had suspectedto be the stone building at the hub of the spokelike roads connecting the villages, they could come andget him.
He took food with the elder, and was escorted,after beer and more talk, which did little to answer any of his persistent questions, to a neatlyfurnished bedroom.
He awoke before dawn, awakened by movementin the house. He dressed quickly. Kleeper andGorben were at table.
"We thought to let you sleep, Honored One," Gorben said.
It wasn't coffee they were drinking, but it had atang, and a pleasant taste. Hen's eggs and baconmade up the main meal, with a chewy, tasty bread.And, breakfast over, one of Pat's unstated questions had an answer.
"Perhaps you will honor us," Kleeper said, having taken a carved wooden chest from a cabinet,"by
distributing the morning prayer tablets."
"My honor," Pat said.
The sun was just above the horizon. All the inhabitants of the village were assembled in thesquare. They looked just too damned bright and cheerful for early morning, and Pat had to force himself to smile.
"One tablet each, of each individual color, toeach person, Honored One," Kleeper said, as a lineformed quickly in front of the low steps to theelder's cabin.
Inside the carved wooden box, five compartmentsheld the latest in food-supplement tablets, some marked with the brand name of a Zedeian nutritional firm. And Pat recognized one of the tabletsas a shotgun disease preventive, good for keepingthe human system free of just about every known disease-causing organism. Mystery number onesolved. The people of Dorchlunt were physicallybeautiful and unbelievably healthy because, eachmorning, they received dosages of the best preventive medicine and the finest in food supplements.
"Now, Honored One," Gorben said, when thelittle ceremony was over and everyone except thebabe in arms had been pilled and tableted, "Iimagine you will leave us."
Pat looked at him quickly to see if Gorben hadbeen detailed to be sure he obeyed orders. Theyoung man showed no signs of it.
"Yes, it is time I paid my respects," he said.
He walked alone through three villages towardthe stone building. The people bowed, greeted him respectfully. It was a lovely morning. Althoughrain was unknown on Dorchlunt, there had beenmorning dew, and in the field alongside the roadmen were busy pumping water from the deep wells. A sophisticated system of irrigation ditches distributed the water to crops, which, in the year-roundgrowing season, were at various stages of maturity.
The earthen road changed to a stone-paved avenue as he neared the temple. The grounds werewell landscaped. Patches of flowering plants, somefamiliar, some not, made for a pleasant vista. Thenative trees of Dorchlunt were squat and thick oftrunk, and had leathery, large leaves.
Two young men in short leather skirts, armedwith well-decorated longbows, guarded the stone temple gates. The guards, Pat felt, were purelyceremonial, since anyone could step over the lowwall at any point and approach the temple bywalking pathways through flowering patches ofvegetation.
There were no guards at the temple door. Hewalked into a large room, lit by skylights, andhalted. The room was at least fifty feet in width,and quite long. The walls were lined with objects obviously taken from the abandoned colony ship.Spacesuits had been stuffed with something sothat they stood alone. Control panels, with buttonsand switches, had been rather artfully built intothe stone walls. And on the wall there were paintings, all of them in deplorable condition with flaking paint and large areas of damage. They wereportraits, likenesses of people dressed in the stylesof long ago, a thousand years ago.
Pat walked through an archway and was stunnedby an array of sculpture along the walls. The medium was stone in various colors. An almost nudewoman posed with an antique projectile hand weapon. A handsome man wore a military uniform painted on the stone statue with great skill,but with the paint fading, flaking. There was anameplate for each statue, and upon close examination Pat saw that they were called gods. TheGod Schmidt. The Goddess Helga.
In a display of conspicuous waste on a planetwith no surface water, a fountain bubbled andsang in the center of the second area. Pat walkedaround it. A man in a dark robe stood quietly inthe next archway, hands folded in front of him.
"The goddess has been expecting you," he said, with respect in his voice. He turned, and Pat followed him through a door which closed behindthem. Then another door, which was plated in hammered gold. The inner sanctum was window-less, light coming from one skylight and two oillamps on columns set on either side of two "thrones."The thrones were also from the abandoned ship,the command chairs from the control bridge. Theywere still mounted on their swivels, and their backswere to Pat.
He glanced around. Most of the gold from theshielding of the blink generator had been utilizedin the inner sanctum. The walls were armoredwith light metal from the ship. Silent, lifeless viewscreens had been built into the walls as decoration. Ship's instruments were grouped around thescreens in neat patterns.
The priest who had led Pat into the closed throneroom bowed to him, backed away, and went out, shutting the gold-clad door behind him.
"Anybody home?" Pat asked, speaking to thehigh backs of the command chairs. One chair began to turn. "Ha?" Pat said, for there was thequiet purr of an electric motor. In the temple, atleast, there was power. And this brought a quickthought. The power source was damned wellshielded, for he'd flown right over the templeinSkimmer and had been unable to detect anything.
The motor hummed, and the command chair turned slowly. He saw her profile first. Her hair had been swept up into a neat, shimmering, auburn mass, and the mass was topped by a diademof gold and jewels. She was dressed in flowing royal purple, and the material was definitely notthe homespun vegetable fibers of the clothing wornby the villagers.